why did find delete everything?

DJOtaku · 07-25-2012, 08:16 AM

So I was trying to delete all the files I have with this in the filename: AdboeJPEG

So first I did a find without delete to make sure I was going to get teh right stuff.

find . -name *ADOBEJPEG*

And I got a long list of all the files. So it looked like it only got the files I needed. Perfect. So I ran

find . -delete -name *ADOBEJPEG*

and it deleted everything in that directory whether or not it matched the search. What did I do wrong?

tizzef · 07-25-2012, 08:53 AM

Hi there,

In the man page of find you will find the following sentence :
"The -delete action also implies -depth."
I think it was the problem that you had encounter...

Cheers.

druuna · 07-25-2012, 09:15 AM

The order of the options are important (as mentioned in the man page):

Quote:

Warnings: Don't forget that the find command line is evaluated
as an expression, so putting -delete first will make find try to
delete everything below the starting points you specified.

This would probably have done what you expected (although errors might be shown):

Code:

find . -name *ADOBEJPEG* -delete

I personally try to zoom in as much as possible (add -type f if you are after files or -type d for directories) and use the -exec rm {} \; option instead of -delete.

This is what i would have used instead:

Code:

find . -type f -name "*ADOBEJPEG*" -exec rm {} \;

Test it without the blue part.

DJOtaku · 07-25-2012, 09:23 AM

ah, I had a feeling order of operations had something to do with it.

Thand druuna. I'll have to give that a shot today. (Luckily I keep backups so I am able to restore all the lost data)

jschiwal · 07-25-2012, 09:26 AM

Also, you need to _always_ put arguments with wild cards inside of quotes. Otherwise it expands before find runs.

DJOtaku · 07-25-2012, 09:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jschiwal

Also, you need to _always_ put arguments with wild cards inside of quotes. Otherwise it expands before find runs.

Can you elaborate on what that means?

TobiSGD · 07-25-2012, 11:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DJOtaku

Can you elaborate on what that means?

If you don't put the name with the *-wildcards into quotes they will be expanded by the shell first instead of being used directly by find. If you use for example the option -name abc*.txt and you have a file abcd.text in your current directory the shell will expand the wildcards to that name, so that find runs with the option -name abcd.txt. This doesn't happen if you quote the wildcards, like -name "abc*.txt".

DJOtaku · 07-25-2012, 11:42 AM

Hmm....that didn't appear to be the case last night. It appeared to catch all files that had AdobeJPEG in the filename.