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How do I safely delete all files with a specific extension (e.g. .bak) from current directory and all subfolders using one command-line? Simply, I'm afraid to use rm since I used it wrong once and now I need advice.

Glutanimate
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user216038
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9 Answers9

1464

You don't even need to use rm in this case if you are afraid. Use find:

find . -name "*.bak" -type f -delete

But use it with precaution. Run first:

find . -name "*.bak" -type f

to see exactly which files you will remove.

Also, make sure that -delete is the last argument in your command. If you put it before the -name *.bak argument, it will delete everything.

See man find and man rm for more info and see also this related question on SE:

Community
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Radu Rădeanu
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    How's this different from rm *.bak? – sayantankhan Nov 15 '13 at 13:11
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    @Bolt64 Your rm *.bak will not work for subdirectories. – Radu Rădeanu Nov 15 '13 at 13:14
  • With default settings rm *.bak will only delete all files ending with .bak in the current directory. TO also do things in subdirectories you either needed to fiddle with globs, use the -r option or use the find example. – Hennes Nov 15 '13 at 13:14
  • Oh yeah, I didn't realize that. – sayantankhan Nov 15 '13 at 13:15
  • You might want to add a '-printto the second example. If you do not specify this then printing is the default, but explicitly stating it is a good idea in case you ever move to an OS which has different defaults. (Same with the.which was mentioned. If you leave that out then some find binaries will assume.` and some will complain about invalid syntax. – Hennes Nov 15 '13 at 13:17
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    @Hennes Be careful with rm -r *.bak! It also removes directories ending in .bak with all their content. – Radu Rădeanu Nov 15 '13 at 13:34
  • True. Without the -r it prints a nice warning. (at least on FreeBSD with bash where I tested it). And maybe we should mention rm's -i flag since it will answer the key problem of the OP: "Not feeling safe with rm". – Hennes Nov 15 '13 at 13:35
  • More generally, you can use e.g. find . -name "*.bak" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 gvfs-trash. (The -print0 and the -0 switch to xargs are important if your filenames might contain spaces or newlines.) Again, it's a good idea to first run just find . -name "*.bak" -type f so you can see what's going to be trashed. – Ilmari Karonen Nov 15 '13 at 21:04
  • @RaduRădeanu, rm -r *.bak would delete directories suffixed by .bak only if these directories are empty, correct ? – Muhammad Gelbana Nov 23 '13 at 20:21
  • @MuhammadGelbana No, with all their content. – Radu Rădeanu Nov 23 '13 at 20:45
  • @RaduRădeanu How can I do the same for two different types of files (for example *.png & *.jpg) without running the command twice? – Khurshid Alam Jun 30 '14 at 13:37
  • @KhurshidAlam find . -name "*.png" -or -name "*.jpg" -type f or find -regex ".*\.\(png\|txt\)" -type f – Radu Rădeanu Jul 01 '14 at 19:52
  • @MohammedArif If you didn't observed yet, you are on askubuntu.com, not on askwin7.com :) – Radu Rădeanu Aug 21 '14 at 08:27
  • OMG, didn't observe it at all :)

    Thanks Radu to remind me.

     – Mohammad Arif Aug 21 '14 at 09:22
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    Make sure that -delete is the last argument in your command. If you put it before the -name *.bak argument, it will delete everything. – Michael come lately Oct 29 '14 at 14:36
  • Thanks @RaduRădeanu. In my opinion, for passing many wildcards, it is cumbersome to do -or -name *.xyz for the many different patterns. On windows, it is simply: del /S *.txt *.log *.tmp *.ttx *.dox *.exe – Shailen Dec 30 '15 at 13:35
  • The precautionary advice is the best part :) Dry run to confirm the files before the actual delete. – SKPS Oct 11 '16 at 12:09
  • You might want to use -iname "*.bak" for a case-insensitive match, to get rid of .BAK files as well. – Márton Tamás May 28 '18 at 17:38
  • @RaduRădeanu Still a great answer after all these years! On my own system I add another safety net in this deletion which is the option -mtime +90. Perhaps this might be useful in your answer, even as a footnote? – andrew.46 Apr 10 '21 at 06:32
  • +1 for the -delete warning! – Majed DH Mar 25 '22 at 15:25
  • Worked like a charm. – Sohail Shrestha Aug 25 '22 at 08:42
  • I can't seem to make this work when wanting to delete .volume dirs with `find . -name ".volume" -type d -delete. Usingfind . -name "*.volume" -type d -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -rd` fixes the problem... is it the dir extension that mangles with the -delete option? – Giuppox Jan 01 '24 at 23:11
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First run the command shopt -s globstar. You can run that on the command line, and it'll have effect only in that shell window. You can put it in your .bashrc, and then all newly started shells will pick it up. The effect of that command is to make **/ match files in the current directory and its subdirectories recursively (by default, **/ means the same thing as */: only in the immediate subdirectories). Then:

rm **/*.bak

(or gvfs-trash **/*.bak or what have you).

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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find . -name "*.bak" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f
muru
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lokers
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Deleting files is for me not something you should use rm for. Here is an alternative:

sudo apt-get install gvfs     # install a tool that allows you to put stuff in the trash
alias "trash"="gvfs-trash"    # you can also put this in .bash_aliases or simply use the command without alias
trash *.bak                   # trash the files (thus moving them to the trash bin)

As Flimm states in the comments:

The package trash-cli does the same thing as gvfs-trash without the dependency on gvfs.

So:

sudo apt-get install trash-cli

You don't need to make an alias for this, because the trash-cli package provides a command trash, which does what we want.

As Eliah Kagan makes clear in extensive comments, you can also make this recursive using find. In that case you can't use an alias, so the commands below assume you have installed trash-cli. I summarise Eliah's comments:

This command finds and displays all .bak files and symlinks anywhere in the current directory or its subdirectories or below. 

find . -name '*.bak' -xtype f

To delete them, append an -exec with the trash command:

find . -name '*.bak' -xtype f -exec trash {} +

-xtype f selects files and symlinks to files, but not folders. To delete .bak folders too, remove that part, and use -execdir, which avoids cannot trash non-existent errors for .bak files inside .bak directories:

find . -name '*.bak' -execdir trash {} +
Zanna
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don.joey
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    "Don't use rm to delete things" is a controversial statement but I have to agree that it's often wiser to use something that will let you undo things. – Oli Nov 15 '13 at 15:12
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    The package trash-cli does the same thing as gvfs-trash without the dependency on gvfs. – Flimm Nov 20 '13 at 09:08
  • I have edited it in the answer, next time feel free to do the edit yourself. – don.joey Nov 20 '13 at 10:06
  • @don.joey This answer seems to say find . -name "*.bak" -type f displays what trash *.bak deletes. Is that really what you mean? You can move directories to the trash with trash or gvfs-trash, but trash *.bak will only moves files and directories whose names end with .bak and that reside immediately in the current directory. The shell expands *.bak, so trash *.bak won't affect .bak files in subdirectories not themselves named .bak. – Eliah Kagan Oct 14 '17 at 02:30
  • @EliahKagan good spot. Yes, in this case ls .*bak would be better. Or do you have an alternative that makes trash recursive? – don.joey Oct 14 '17 at 13:23
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    @don.joey Yes ls *.bak (which I think you mean) lists what trash *.bak trashes. find . -name '*.bak' -xtype f -exec trash {} + trashes all .bak files anywhere under .. It can't use an alias, so install trash-cli or write gvfs-trash instead. Here's an example. -xtype f selects files and symlinks to files, but not folders. To delete .bak folders too, use find . -name '*.bak' -execdir trash {} +, which avoids cannot trash non existent errors for .bak files inside .bak directories. Please feel free to use any of this in your answer. – Eliah Kagan Oct 14 '17 at 19:15
  • @EliahKagan much appreciated! have incorporated them, feel free to edit and make it a community wiki if that helps – don.joey Oct 16 '17 at 19:56
  • Excellent idea having a trash option by command line. For those who do not, having an alias such as in bash/zsh: alias rm='rm -i' (same for mv or maybe even rmdir) is often enough to issue a 'are you really sure you want do delete this?' on the command line before rm destroys anything. – Jeff Clayton Aug 13 '21 at 20:57
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If you want to delete all files of a certain type, but only 1 folder "deep" from the current folder:

find . -maxdepth 2 -name "*.log" -type f -delete

-maxdepth 2 because the current directory "." counts as the first folder.

Hypocritus
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Quick Answer:

  • Delete all files with the considered name or postfix recursively:

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

  • Delete all directories with the considered name recursively:

    find ~ -path '*/__pycache__/*' -delete‍‍‍
find ~ -type d -name '__pycache__' -empty -delete‍‍‍

    Somewhat less tightly controlled, but in a single line:

    find ~ -path '*/__pycache__*' -delete

[NOTE]:

d is directory option and f is file option.

Benyamin Jafari
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If in case you want to check the list before you delete the files, you can echo it.

find . -name "*.bak" -type f | xargs echo rm -rf

This will list out the search results that are piped to rm command via xargs. Once you are sure about the list you can drop the echo in above command.

find . -name "*.bak" -type f | xargs rm -rf
Eashwar Gadanchi
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  • its a good practice to add -print0 | xargs -0 to handle cornercase filenames, example test's gives you xargs: unmatched single quote; by default quotes are special to xargs unless you use the -0 option or filenames with newlines will break. –  Nov 25 '19 at 07:02
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You can list all the files with that extension first before you use rm For example,

ls *.bak

If you get only the files that you want to delete then you can use the rm

rm *.bak
ijyrem
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Once you are confident that all your files of a particular extension (eg. .bak) has to be deleted, just use:

rm -ir *.bak

It will give you a prompt:

rm: remove regular file 'example.bak'?

Answer the prompt with a y for Yes and n for No

Mudassir Ansari
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    This isn't a correct answer to the question unfortunately. What you are suggesting will only delete .bak files in the current folder and any directories named *.bak which is almost certainly not what you want. It won't touch files named *.bak in subdirectories – moo Jan 03 '24 at 09:25
  • My aim is not to delete a file name *.bak but to delete all the files with extension .bak. And for that the above command is. And for other file extensions we can just change the .bak – Mudassir Ansari Mar 24 '24 at 17:58