Run a command against multiple directories with slightly different names

I want to run a command to delete backups so that I can reduce disk usage. Not sure how, but * represents all the directories under the sites directory

sudo rm -r sites/*/private/backups/*

My directory structure would be as given below:

ls sites 

sites/hello/private/backups/
sites/world/private/backups/
sites/hello_world.txt

This is not working

NOTE: This assumes that you use the convention of adding the ~ suffix to backups. If you use something else, you need to change the find argument accordingly. For example, if you use, If you instead of something like .bak, the *~ should instead be .bak.

Try this:

First, run

sudo find /sites -type f -name '*~' 

and look through the output. If you are comfortable with deleting the files in the listing, reenter the command, but pipe the output to rm as in

sudo find /sites -type f -name '*~' -print0 | xargs -0 /usr/bin/rm

This will cause the shell to execute rm PATHNAME on each PATHNAME in the list.

The * character in bash is a wildcard character. It will match one or more instances of almost any character. The most notable exception to this rule is the / character, which is why it only matches one directory at a time in your example. Use ** to match any number of directories in a pathname.

EDIT:

Just noticed that you listed your directory as sites/... and not /sites/.... You need to be sure that the first parameter passed to find is the full path to the directory. Otherwise, it will just return an error.

EDIT 2:

While I was fixing the second command, I realized that that find itself can do what rm is doing but without the need to make any extra calls. This should work, but I still wouldn't advise doing it without first running the top version to see exactly what will be deleted. The command is

sudo find /sites -type f -name '*~' -delete

As a final tip, if you use find a lot, and have system backups, you see your output overtaken by duplicates. If so, look up the -prune option. It will keep anything matching its associated argument out of the output.