I’ve found on numerous occasions that I needed to recursively remove all the .svn directories from a checked out copy of my code. I’ve always just googled it and found the command quickly that way since I don’t know how to do it off the top of my head. I consider myself pretty fluent in Unix systems but there are just some commands that I’ve never really dug into much. Here is what google turns up:

How does that really work? Well, we first have to understand how the first command works before the pipe:

If you omit the ‘-print0′ it simply dumps all the .svn directories it finds recursively from the current directory. The ‘-print0′ works in conjunction with the ‘-0′ option inside the pipe. The ‘-print0′ basically doesn’t return a new line but rather formats the output in a way that you can process each element of the results using the ‘xargs’ command.

That command really won’t do much unless you pass it something, usually through the pipe. So, ‘xargs’ just takes the output from the find command and process each element of the results by passing it to the command specified. In this case it is ‘rm -rf’. So combined we have ‘find’ getting all the results and piping the whole thing to ‘xargs’ and ‘xargs’ passes each element of that set to a ‘rm -rf’ command. Its fairly simple when you break it down.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 4th, 2007 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.