I copied a directory using this:
cp -r dir/ ../../ without thinking and realized that it copied the contents of dir instead of actually dir to the above directory. Now I have a mess of files I need to delete so I can redo the cp correctly. How can I delete all the files that I mistakenly copied over if they don't match anything in particular?
Ok, this is basically the same as klapaucius' answer. (And it won't repair any damage done if cp has overwritten some existing files.)
Assuming you are in the source directory (in dir). This command:
find . -type f -exec echo '{}' ';' will list all the files (recursively) present in your dir directory (quite like -print). The -type f option is there to prevent the listing of sub-directories.
So, if you use:
find dir -type f -exec echo '../../../{}' ';' This should list corresponding files (copies) in the target directory.
Now if the list is correct, you will be able to remove the copies using:
find dir -type f -exec rm -- '../../../{}' ';' As for pruning remaining empty directories that come from the cp… hum…
echo method to double check the file names first. However, I need to change dir to . or else it doesn't seem to work. Also, it only lists the files in dir, not the ones also in ../.. cp copy the content and not the directory in this case? /! ./dir/? Should it have been ./dir instead? cp versions it seems… Mine (coreutils 8.12) has not this behavior anymore. (It was useful sometimes.) Use find in combination with -exec. Better test with ls before like this:
find . -name "*" -exec ls ../../{} \; 
. (the copied dir), it sees if it is also two directories up? To remove them I use rm instead of ls? find: missing argument to '-exec' The following code handles file names which contain embedded newlines I've put a full version script on paste.ubuntu. It checks for existance and matching sizes... The code to generate the test data is also included there.
# This lists the original fully-qualified filename, # and its would-be counterpart (assuming it exists) unset a i while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' relf; do printf "%s\n$s" "$PWD${relf:1}" "$(dirname "$(dirname "$PWD")")${relf:1}" done < <(find . -type f \! -name '.' -name '*' -print0) Here is a sample output of the full version (mentioned above), where one file is missing, and another has a different file size to the original
WARNING ----- NOT in target ./file1 ok -------- sizes match ./c/file4-in-subdir WARNING ------ size mis-match ./file3 is triple-spaced ok -------- sizes match ./file2 has newline! You want to remove into PATH_DIR1 existing files in PATH_DIR2 :
find PATH_DIR1 -type f -exec basename '{}' ';' | xargs printf -- 'PATH_DIR2/%s\n' | xargs rm Explanations :
find PATH_DIR1 -type f -exec basename '{}' ';'
xargs printf -- 'PATH_DIR2/%s\n'
xargs rm
