Golang : Delete certain files in a directory
Encounter a situation today where I need to delete some files in a directory. Not all files, but some files with certain pattern in their names. This code below will demonstrate how to scan a given directory and delete those unwanted files.
Let say I want to remove all files that have "dumb_" in their names and not others.
ls -la testdir/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 5 sweetlogic staff 170 Oct 24 10:07 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 45 sweetlogic staff 1530 Oct 24 10:06 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 sweetlogic staff 0 Oct 23 15:13 dumb3.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 sweetlogic staff 0 Oct 23 15:13 dumb_1.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 sweetlogic staff 0 Oct 23 15:13 dumb_2.txt
and the program code :
scandelete.go
package main
import (
"flag"
"os"
"path/filepath"
"strings"
)
var flagPath = flag.String("path", "", "path to walk in search for dumb_* files to delete.")
func deletefiles(path string, f os.FileInfo, err error) (e error) {
// check each file if starts with the word "dumb_"
if strings.HasPrefix(f.Name(), "dumb_") {
os.Remove(path)
}
return
// See https://www.socketloop.com/tutorials/golang-delete-files-by-extension
// on how to delete file by extension
}
func init() {
flag.Parse()
}
func main() {
// check if the user specify a path
if *flagPath == "" {
flag.Usage() // if no, prompt usage
os.Exit(0) // and exit
}
// walk through the files in the given path and perform partialrename()
// function
filepath.Walk(*flagPath, deletefiles)
}
result after executing this command ./scandelete -path="/Users/sweetlogic/testdir"
ls -la
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 3 sweetlogic staff 102 Oct 24 10:08 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 46 sweetlogic staff 1564 Oct 24 10:07 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 sweetlogic staff 0 Oct 23 15:13 dumb3.txt
May you find this simple tutorial useful :-)
By Adam Ng
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