Good to know. Thank. On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Bob McGowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> ChadDavis wrote: > > > I have a simple bash scripting question. > > > > I have a tree of directories from which I would like to recursively dig > > into, removing source control meta-information from. In this case, the > > meta-data is in .svn folders. > > Does anyone have any elegant suggestions on how to do this? > > > > Others have mentioned the -exec rm... and pipe to xargs rm methods. > > These are probably the quickest way to do it. There are tools in > scripting languages like Perl to accomplish similar things, but that would > take more work so is only useful if you need to repeat this several times > and want to be extra careful with error checking. > > A comment regarding -exec versus piping to xagrs is in order, though. > > The -exec will run the command for each instance found. So if there are 3 > directories found, rm will be run 3 times. > > xargs tries to build up a command with as many arguments as it can fit (at > least this is the case in this default use). So with the same 3 > directories, you'd get one execution of rm with the three directories as > arguments. > > For three, this is probably not significant. For hundreds or thousands, > it can be a big advantage to avoid all those fork/exec calls. > > -- > Bob McGowan >
