How to recursively search for directory by name and delete all regular files in it

Question

I'm working on a bash script in an AWS EC2 instance (RHEL derived) which needs to do the following:

1. Search for all directories named "_combined" in ${PROJECT_DIR}
2. Delete all regular files in all those directories - but not the directory itself

What's the best approach to do this?

Answer 1

So, something like

find "$PROJECT_DIR" -path "*/_combined/*" -type f

And if that seems right:

find "$PROJECT_DIR" -path "*/_combined/*" -type f -delete

Of course that will hit all regular files in the whole tree, not just immediate contents of _combined.

Answer 2

This will do what you've described. When you are sure it works, replace the -print clause with -delete:

find "$PROJECT_DIR" -type d -name '_combined' -execdir find '_combined' -maxdepth 1 -type f -print \;

What it does is to search for all directories named _combined underneath $PROJECT_DIR, and in each one it runs the second find snippet which will remove all non-directories in the found directory.