As I am using a 256GB hard-drive, I often need to free up space. I have many projects on my computer, and each project has a node_modules folder. These folders can take up a lot of space, so I often delete them. However, I don’t want to go through each project and delete the node_modules folder manually. So I found a terminal command on stackoverdlow to do it for me.
find /path/to/start -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -exec rm -rf {} +Explanation
find: This is the command that searches for files in a directory hierarchy
/path/to/start: This is the directory you want to start searching from. Replace this with your actual starting directory
-name "node_modules": This tells find to search for directories with the name “node_modules”
-type d: This tells find to only search for directories (not files)
-prune: This prevents find from descending into the current file. This is needed because if find descends into the directory before deleting it, it can cause errors.
-exec rm -rf {} +: This tells find to execute the rm -rf command (which deletes directories) on each directory it finds. The {} is replaced by the current file name. Including the + passes the list of directories to a single rm -rf command instead of running it on each directory individually as explained here.