How do I recursively delete directories with wildcard?

Question

I am working through SSH on a WD My Book World Edition. Basically I would like to start at a particular directory level, and recursively remove all sub-directories matching .Apple* - how would I go about that? I tried

rm -rf .Apple* and rm -fR .Apple*

both not deleting directories matching that name within sub-directories.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Dany.

Answer 1

find is very useful for selectively performing actions on a whole tree.

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

Here, the -type f makes sure it's a file, not a directory, and may not be exactly what you want since it will also skip symlinks, sockets and other things. You can use ! -type d, which literally means not directories, but then you might also delete character and block devices. I'd suggest looking at the -type predicate on the man page for find.

To do it strictly with a wildcard, you need advanced shell support, since this it's not POSIX standard. Bash v4 has the globstar option, which lets you recursively match subdirectories using **. zsh and ksh also support this pattern. Using that, you can do rm -rf **/.Apple*.

Answer 2

Simple command:

rm `find ./ -name '.Apple*'` -rf

Good luck!

Answer 3

What is possible is that there is nothing wrong with your rm/find command, but that the user you are logged in with doesn't actually have delete permissions. Use ls -l to list things with their permissions, and you can identify who you are with the id and groups commands (either should be available). If you are the "wrong user" to do this, you would need to either change the permissions/ownership of the files, or switch to another user.

Answer 4

Try:

shopt -s dotglob           # using Bash
printf '%s\n' ./.Apple*    # test
#rm -rf ./.Apple*