How to remove all files with a certain extension

John Almberg jalmberg at identry.com
Mon Apr 6 16:10:07 PDT 2009


On Apr 6, 2009, at 5:11 PM, Dan Nelson wrote:

> In the last episode (Apr 06), John Almberg said:
>> This is a real newbie question, but I can't figure it out...
>>
>> I want to remove all .tar files from a directory tree. I think  
>> something
>> like the following should work, but I must have something wrong,  
>> because
>> it doesn't:
>>
>> find . -name *.tar -exec rm /dev/null {} \;
>
> find . -name "*.tar" -delete
>
> Make sure you quote your wildcards so the shell doesn't expand  
> them, and use
> the -delete primary to save a fork/exec for each filename.

Fantastic. I never noticed the -delete option before. Amazing what  
you can find in a man page if you know it's there :-)

Thanks: John





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