Delete all node_modules dirs recursively with find

If you have hundreds of past JavaScript projects sitting in your workspace folder, you probably also have hundreds of node_modules folders nested inside of them, and hundreds of thousands actual npm modules resting peacefully in those.

Often enough all you care about is the code that uses the modules and not the modules themselves, so to save yourself some precious laptop diskspace you can just delete all those folders! When you need them again cd into the project directory and run yarn install or npm install.

First let's do a dry run:

find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune

and now that you checked the output of the above command you can delete all the nested node_module folders.

If you are still feeling paranoid (and you're on macOS) you can simply move those to the Trash:

find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -exec trash '{}' +

If you feel a little braver just unlatch the airlock and toss them into a black hole 🕳 using rm -rf

find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -exec rm -rf '{}' +

I saved a whopping 80GB with this technique 🤑. Hope you find it helpful.