List Tree difference to delete dirs (linux)

Question

I've made a mistake and copied +16000 dirs into the home dir of a website. Now the home dirs and the dirs copied are in the same tree. My problem is of course not to delete the dirs which were originaly on the home dir and only the copied dirs... And (important) there was perhaps same dir name in the home dir, so the 2 have fusionned!...

My idea is to list the difference between the dir and the home dir then use this file to make a bash delete script. But I can't find the right command to have the list.. I tryied this but with no success:

comm <(ls DIR1) <(ls DIR2)

Any idea please?

'copied +16000 dirs into the home dir of a website' - just how long did that mistake take? — Martin James, Dec 18 '13 at 18:07
from `man comm: comm - compare two sorted files line by line`. You'll have to do some manip of your `<(ls DIR1)` etc output so it is sorted in a way that is useful to comm (I think!) . Good luck. — shellter, Dec 18 '13 at 18:40

stark · Answer 1 · 2013-12-18T19:21:44.250

0

You can make a list of the directories in a given directory with

find dir1 -maxdepth 1 -type d  | sort > sorted_list1

Make a list for each dir, sort them, then use the differences to decide what to do with each dir.

To get the directories that are common, do:

comm -12 sorted_list1 sorted_list2

To get the directories that are just in dir2 do:

comm -13 sorted_list1 sorted_list2

edited Dec 18 '13 at 19:21

answered Dec 18 '13 at 18:40

stark

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Ok but how to get the difference?... – user2965169 Dec 18 '13 at 18:52
I updated the answer to explain. – stark Dec 18 '13 at 19:21
Finally I've made a php script... Thanks for your help. – user2965169 Dec 18 '13 at 19:38

List Tree difference to delete dirs (linux)

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