rm and recursive deletion

disruptive · 02-15-2006, 05:40 AM

Hi

I have many files ending .o in a variety of subdirectories which I wish to delete in one go. The recursive delete on the parent directory does not delete those in the subdirectory. I am trying rm -r *.o Is there a way to do this or should I use grep and pipe the results?

Thanks

muha · 02-15-2006, 06:02 AM

maybe you want
find .. -exec
example:
http://www.athabascau.ca/html/depts/...HOWTO/find.htm

try the option with -print first, to see what you are about to delete ..

sohny · 02-15-2006, 07:23 AM

try

rm -rf *.o

muha · 02-15-2006, 07:58 AM

@sohny: why does adding the --force option cause rm to recurse in lower directories if the previous rm -r *.o did not?

@disruptive: what do you get from this

Code:

ls -r *.o

then rm -r *.o
should work nicely to delete the file you got from the ls command.

You might want to add the -i option to rm to check what you are deleting. So:
rm -ir *.o