Delete Directories Recursively in MacOS and Linux

To delete directories recursively, run the following command while replacing /path/goes/here/ and directory_name as needed:

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$ find /path/goes/here/ -type d -name "directory_name" -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 {}

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 directories, but that is out of the scope of this post :)