remove all file types from dir not working

Question

My dir is as following:

Music: 1.mp3, 2.flac, 3.wav, 4.ogg and 5.mp4

I'm trying to remove all files with extensions: .mp3, .wav, .flac and .ogg with the following command:

find ./Music -type f -name \('*.mp3' -or -name '*.wav' -or -name '*.flac' -or -name '*.ogg'\) -delete

but it's doing nothing to the directory

any idea why?

(i'm one level higher than the Music dir btw)

Answer 1

You have the syntax wrong. You want all the -name options in the same parentheses, and a space around the parentheses, like this:

find ./Music -type f  \( -name '*.mp3' -or -name '*.wav' -or -name '*.flac' -or -name '*.ogg' \) -delete

Your original command was using -name \('*.mp3' -or -name '*.wav' -or -name '*.flac' -or -name '*.ogg'\) which means it was looking for files named \(*.mp3, or '*.wav' or '*.flac' or '*.ogg'\). You can see this if you run the command without the -delete option:

$ find ./Music -type f -name \('*.mp3' -or -name '*.wav' -or -name '*.flac' -or -name '*.ogg'\) 
./Music/3.wav
./Music/2.flac

Since there are no matches for \('*.mp3' or *.ogg\), those files were not found. And since you hadn't grouped the command in parentheses (you need spaces around the parentheses for that to work), the -delete wasn't applied as you expected (sorry, I don't know exactly how find would have parsed that).