How can I recursively delete all files of a specific extension in the current directory?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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:

• How do I remove all .pyc files from a project?

Answer 2

find . -name "*.bak" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f

Answer 3

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).

Answer 4

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 {} +

Answer 5

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.