Übergibson

I’ve got a directory on my computer with lots of toy projects, many of which have Makefiles and build.xml files.

Every now and then I back up this directory, and to save space and time I decided I should probably figure out a way to ‘make clean’ on all of them before making a big tarball of source, object files, and executables.

I didn’t feel like handcoding a “meta Makefile” with a “make clean” directive for each subdirectory, so I pooped out cleanall.sh:

#!/bin/bash
# cleanall.sh - executes 'make clean' in subdirectories with Makefiles
MYDIR=`pwd`
for DIR in `find . -name Makefile -maxdepth 2 -exec dirname {} ';'`; do
	echo Cleaning $DIR...
	cd $DIR; make clean
	cd $MYDIR
done

MYDIR=`pwd`

save the current directory in MYDIR.

for DIR in `find . -name Makefile -maxdepth 2 
-exec dirname {} ';'`; do

execute find(1) starting in the current directory looking for files named Makefile and going no more than 2 directories deep. Execute dirname(1) on what’s found, and store the result in DIR.

cd $DIR; make clean

move into the Makefile’s directory and execute ‘make clean.’

cd $MYDIR

go back to the starting directory

This tiny script is a good example of how awesome find -exec is, and is a good starting point for doing lots of different things on files you dig up using find(1).