Recursively delete all files with a given extension

Question

I want to delete all *.o files in a directory and its sub-directories. However, I get an error:

sashoalm@aspire:~/.Workspace.OLD$ rm -r *.o
rm: cannot remove `*.o': No such file or directory

On the other hand, rm *.o works, but it's not recursive.

The "duplicate" is for removing directories matching a pattern, not files as in this question! — Futal, Aug 31 '16 at 05:51
@Futal no it's not. The answer's title is a mismatch, but its accepted solution deletes files by glob pattern. — Chris Davies, Sep 15 '16 at 16:12
@roaima In https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/292329/does-the-same-answer-imply-that-the-questions-should-be-closed-as-duplicate, there is some discussion on whether the same solution means exact duplicate. I don't know which side is the "official" stance though. — sashoalm, Sep 15 '16 at 17:45
A useful bit for find command - “find: paths must precede expression:” How do I specify a recursive search that also finds files in the current directory? — RBT, Dec 06 '19 at 09:45

score 465 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 21 '21 at 14:36

465

That is evil: rm -r is not for deleting files but for deleting directories. Luckily there are probably no directories matching *.o.

What you want is possible with zsh but not with sh or bash (new versions of bash can do this, but only if you enable the shell option globstar with shopt -s globstar). The globbing pattern is **/*.o but that would not be limited to files, too (maybe zsh has tricks for the exclusion of non-files, too).

But this is rather for find:

find . -type f -name '*.o' -delete

or (as I am not sure whether -delete is POSIX)

find . -type f -name '*.o' -exec rm {} +

edited Apr 21 '21 at 14:36

psygo

201

answered Feb 22 '14 at 12:49

Hauke Laging

90,279

11

Can you please explain the curly braces and the plus sign in this context? – Aubrey Robertson Aug 18 '16 at 16:53
4

works fine on macOS – To Kra Nov 22 '16 at 09:36
7

@AubreyRobertson See the man page for find. -exec + (in contrast to -exec ;) handles several files at once. The {} is the place holder for the file name / path (in both cases). – Hauke Laging Jan 02 '17 at 00:34
You should also add double quotes around {}, like: find . -type f -name '*.o' -exec rm "{}" + – stpoa Sep 28 '17 at 13:10
5

@stpoa I encourage you to try to find an example where my code does not work as intended. – Hauke Laging Sep 28 '17 at 18:01
1

find has a delete flag. The things you learn each day. Excellent! – CaptainCrunch Sep 21 '20 at 14:52
you can also use the fd utility instead of find to make the command a bit simpler: fd --extension o --exec rm – tbrugere May 15 '21 at 10:08

score 80 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 21 '21 at 15:32

That's not quite how the -r switch of rm works:

-r, -R, --recursive
          remove directories and their contents recursively

rm has no file searching functionality, its -r switch does not make it descend into local directories and identify files matching the pattern you give it. Instead, the pattern (*.o) is expanded by the shell and rm will descend into and remove any directories whose name matches that pattern. If you had a directory whose name ended in .o, then the command you tried would have deleted it, but it won't find .o files in subdirectories.

What you need to do is either use find:

find . -name '*.o' -delete

or, for non-GNU find:

find . -name '*.o' -exec rm -r {} \;

Alternatively, if you are using bash you can enable globstar:

shopt -s globstar
rm -r -- **/*.o

NOTE: all three options will delete directories whose name ends in .o as well, if that's not what you want, use one of these:

find . -type f -name '*.o' -delete
find . -type f -name '*.o' -exec rm {} \;
rm -- **/*.o

When I run this with -exec rm -rf, it deletes a folder I'm trying to match & remove, then errors with No such file or directory, and exit code is non-zero... Is there a way to get around this error? (operation was still a success) — Soylent Graham, Aug 29 '23 at 13:01
@SoylentGraham use -depth which makes find operate on the contents of a directory before the directory itself: find . -depth -name '*.o' -exec rm -rf {} \; — terdon, Aug 29 '23 at 13:04

Recursively delete all files with a given extension

2 Answers2

Linked

Related