Bash: deleting (or operating) on same folder (or file) in different parent subfolders

I have a tree of folders like this:

folderA/
        subA/
        subB/
folderB/
        subA/
        subB/
folderC/
        subA/
        subB/

That is, I have a folder “subA” and “subB” in different subfolders.

The problem: I want to delete folders “subA” and “subB” in all parent folders recursively with only one command, without deleting the parent folders.

The solution: the find command

1. the find command accepts the option -name to specifying a file or folder name to match; also it accepts a -type option to specify if you want find to process only files or only folders (-type f or -type d, respectively); moreover, it accepts the -exec command to run a command on every file or folder found
2. The command find . -name 'sub*' -type d will start from the current folder (the . folder) and will find all subfolders whose names start with the string “sub”
3. test your selection command, executing a simple ls command on found directories. The command find . -name 'sub*' -type d -exec ls -d {} \; will execute the command ls on all subfolders found by find.
4. replace ls -d {} with rm -rf {} to delete all subfolders found by find: find . -name 'sub*' -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;

Notes:

• if you want to limit the level of recursion in the file listing, you can use the -maxdepth option; for example: find . -name 'sub*' -maxdepth 1 will look only among the subfolders at the first depth level

• You can use the above command to check your folders for local changes compared to a remote SVN repository: find . -name 'sub*' -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec svn stat {} \;