# How to remove all the node_modules folders content

> Learn how to bulk remove every node_modules folder with a single find command, freeing up gigabytes of disk space across all your old Node.js projects.

Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2020-03-11 | Topics: [JavaScript](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/js/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/how-to-bulk-remove-node-modules/

I had to transfer a folder full of old projects to a new computer, and after trying to compress it, I realized the size was 8GB. A bit too much for some coding projects that only contain text files.

They were all [JavaScript](https://flaviocopes.com/javascript/) projects, and every project contained a `node_modules` folder.

The folder is totally unnecessary because I can always run `npm install` in a project to re-generate it, and most of those projects I had in that folder were old things I’ll never use ever again.

So I decided to remove all the `node_modules` folders, but they were too many. So I went into the parent folder, which I called `dev`, and I ran this command in the ZSH terminal, the shell that comes by default with macOS Catalina:

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

This reduced the size of my folder from 8GB to 2GB. Pretty nice for a one-line command.

I found this command [on this blog](https://rtmccormick.com/2018/01/10/clear-node-modules-folders-recursively-mac-linux/), there you can find more explanation on the command details.