Recursively remove files with wildcard

[oroboro]

I've been searching for a way to do this extremely simple task but cannot seem to find one. What I want to do is remove all the files of a certain type (.class) recursively.
I tried this:

rm -rv *.class

But it doesn't work (because Linux takes care of wildcards rather than the program?)

I know that I can use a for loop to do it, but is there no simpler way?

[Ramses de Norre]

That command should work.. I use wildcards like that all the time.
Are you sure you're in the right directory etc? Does rm output something?

[oroboro]

That worked, thanks a lot.

Originally Posted by Ramses de Norre That command should work.. I use wildcards like that all the time. Are you sure you're in the right directory etc? Does rm output something?

Yes I am sure that I was in the same directory. It says that it cannot find the specified file. If you can get it to somehow work, could you post how you did it?

[souki]

rm -r is for deleting directories recursively, this is not what you want to do

instead, you can use find, something like that (replace the path and the pattern) :

first check :

find /path_to_search -type f -name "*the_patern*"

and then, delete :

find /path_to_search -type f -name "*the_patern*" -exec rm {} \;

NB: the '\' and the ';' are important

[souki]

sorry, double post

[souki]

for your security, I have to tell you,

I'm sure that rm -r works only on directories
if you don't believe me, check the manual

or try this proof :

touch blah.class mkdir sub1 touch sub1/blah.class rm -r *.class ls sub1/

it will only remove the first blah.class, because it's the only one matching the patern
that's it, the pattern cannot be recursive
all you can do is

rm *.class */*.class */*/*.class ... ans so on

now, if you have a directory named "sub.class", rm -rf *.class will remove the directory and all the files inside (recursively)

please, always use the "find" method I mention earlier, it is safe

[Hossie]

There is an easy explanation for that: All wildcards get expanded by the shell _before_ it gets passed to the program. Programs never see wildcards. So the shell expands *.class to 1.class 2.class in the current directory, and then passes these arguments to the program. So you just pass 2 "class" files to rm, and it just deletes that.

[Ramses de Norre]

ramses@icarus:~$ mkdir test
ramses@icarus:~$ cd test/
ramses@icarus:~/test$ touch 1.class
ramses@icarus:~/test$ touch 2.class
ramses@icarus:~/test$ touch foo.class
ramses@icarus:~/test$ touch test
ramses@icarus:~/test$ ls
1.class  2.class  foo.class  test
ramses@icarus:~/test$ rm *.class
ramses@icarus:~/test$ ls
test
ramses@icarus:~/test$

Is it this kind of thing you were trying to do?

[souki]

I don't think so, he's pretty clear with what he wants to do
"remove all *.class files recursively"

[sstucke]

I wrote a howto for deleting files recursively (you may even preview which files will be deleted):
http://en.tuxero.com/2007/09/how-to-...-files-in.html
Cheers!