Finding .m4p files on external hard drive so they can be deleted???? Help

Question

I just copied my very large music library from one external hard drive to a second external hard drive. I am giving the hard drive to my daughter at college, but before I do, I want to remove all the .m4p protected songs from the second drive so the protected music doesn't fall into other peoples hands.
When I search the drive, it finds no .m4p files. I think it is because the search function is not looking into the sub folders. In other words, I click on the hard drive, it expands to show all the artist names. I then do a search for *.m4p and it comes up with nothing. Clearly I do not want to go through each album name under each artist because there are about 4000 artists and 50,000 songs.
How can have have the search function look into every file and identify all the *.m4p files so I can delete them before sharing?
Thanks

Answer 1

Matt Krumwiede wrote:
Thanks for the suggestion, but I am not sure I understand....
Is there not a way to do a search of a disc to find all .m4p files in folders and the sub folders?
You can use the terminal:
Macintosh-HD -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal
mac $ ls /Volumes/Spotless/spotless.*
/Volumes/Spotless/spotless.png
mac $ ls /Volumes/Spotless/spotless* 
/Volumes/Spotless/spotless-test.m4p     /Volumes/Spotless/spotless.png
mac $ find /Volumes/Spotless/  -iname '*.m4p'
/Volumes/Spotless//spotless-test.m4p
Run the list command to see what files will be found.
mac $ find /Volumes/Spotless -name '*.m4p'  -exec ls {} \;
/Volumes/Spotless/spotless-test.m4p
Be careful with this command. The rm commands will delete a file.
mac $ find /Volumes/Spotless -name '*.m4p'  -exec rm -i  {} \;
remove /Volumes/Spotless/spotless-test.m4p? y
mac $ 
It seems strange that I would need a 3rd party ap to do so.
the Spotless facility was introduced with tiger. Spotless does not do well when searching by filename.
I have found that spotlight is inconsistent when searching by filename. To search by filename, try:
FindAnyFile
"This is a free program for Mac OS 10.4 and later that lets you search for files on your disks, primarily on HFS formatted ones."
http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/
EasyFind
An alternative to or supplement of Spotlight and finds files, folders or contents in any file without the need for indexing.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/systemdiskutilities/easyfind.html
Sometimes I have to resort to Unix.
Macintosh-HD -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal
I prefer to use iname instead of name because iname is case independent whereas name is case depended.
#this command finds anything starting with python
find / -iname 'python*'
You can also run commands against the found file. Be careful. Always list the file before doing something.
# this is the safe list command. No changes are made.
find /home/robert -user robert -exec ls {} \;
{} is the filename
\; is the required characters for lineend
Message was edited by: rccharles