We can use the find command to delete a specific directory recursively. This is the command formula:

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find /path/to/starting/directory/ -type d -name "directory_to_delete" -exec rm -rf {} \;

For example, if we wanted to delete all node_modules directories within the path /projects/javascript/, we would run:

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find /projects/javascript/ -type d -name "node_modules" -exec rm -rf {} \;

I noticed sometimes the output says:

find: ./node_modules: No such file or directory

But the command should still work.

If you look closely, we’re really just executing a command against all node_modules directories in the /projects/javascript/ directory (rm -rf). This command can be modified to execute other commands against all node_modules directories, but that is out of the scope of this post :)