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I have the following structure:

... etc

I want to delete all the .svn folders. How do I do it?

It's NOT:

rm -rf .svn

In windows you use the /s trigger. How do you do it linux?

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4 Answers

Use the command find:

find . -type d -name .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;

{} is the filename, -type d means directories.

Warning: use find and rm together with caution!

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+1 for the warning, find and rm is potentially a very dangerous combination. –  Dom May 25 '10 at 10:03
Will fill your terminal with lots of warnings of "find: '.../.svn': No such file or directory". The directories get removed, but you can avoid the warnings with -depth (see my answer). –  DevSolar May 25 '10 at 11:37
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find . -depth -type d -name .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;

Differences to other solutions already presented:

  • without -depth, the command will attempt to recurse into the .svn directory after it has deleted it, resulting in error messages.

  • without -type d (which limits your search to directories), you would also delete files of the given name. (Most likely you won't have any, but you shouldn't take chances when doing a combination of "find" and "rm".)

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While your -depth addition is very good (+1 from me), I did have the -type d option in my solution. –  Peter Jaric May 25 '10 at 15:00
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If your exact need is to remove .svn directories and not a more general solution for removing specifically named directories, you should consider using svn export:

$ svn export . /tmp/new-dir

This will create a copy of the svn work area in the current directory into a new directory at /tmp/new-dir. You don't need to create the new directory first. Subversion will take care of that for you.

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Should work for you.
It first finds all folders named .svn Then executing rm -rf for each folder found.

No more .svn folders

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find: missing argument to `-exec' –  Dennis Williamson May 25 '10 at 13:45
That's what happens when you forget the space before \;. –  DevSolar May 26 '10 at 9:51
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