Pesky Windows "Thumbs.db" Files

Windows creates a Thumbs.db file whenever it finds an image in a directory. If you are trying to reduce the number of files on your file system, or trying (really hard) to save space, you can issue the following commands as administrator.

locate -r ".*/Thumbs.db" > ~/delme-thumbs.txt

Which queries the mlocate database for the thumbnail files. If you're not running mlocate, you would use the find command here.

cat ~/delme-thumbs.txt | tr \\n \\0 | xargs -0 du -hsc

This will show you how much each file is taking up and include a sum of the total size. Finally, you might want to free these files with the following command:

cat delme-thumbs.txt | tr \\n \\0 | xargs -0 rm