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I want to cleanup a directory (and subdirectories) from each occurrance of the .py and .pyc files. I tried the following
find . -name '*pyc' -o -name '*py~' -exec rm -f {} \;
which left out all pyc files. When doing
find . -name '*pyc' -o -name '*py~'
the command finds the pyc files, which are not deleted, whatsoever. Any insights?
Instead of using the -o why not just do a wildcard pattern?
find . -name '*py[c~]' -delete
or:
find . -name '*py[c~]' -exec rm -f {} +
The -a operator (implicit between two predicates) has precedence over -o, so you need parenthesis:
find . \( -name '*pyc' -o -name '*py~' \) -a -exec rm -f {} +
(I include the -a above for demonstration purpose only, it is not needed as it is implicit). I replaced ; with + as there's probably no point running one rm per file if that can be avoided.
-delete is not a standard option. By all means, use it if your find supports it, but don't use it in scripts that are meant to be portable.
– Stéphane Chazelas
Apr 4 '13 at 17:56
If you have bash 4+, you don't even need find, since globstar will give you recursive globbing:
shopt -s globstar
for f in ./**/*.py{c,~}; do rm "$f"; done
Note that shopt needs to be on its own line, rather than separated by a ; (and should be used at the very top of a script, directly below the shebang if possible).
I know that the question it's not so new... but maybe it was enough to use
rm -f `find . -name '*.pyc' -o -name '*.py~' `
