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From: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: recursively deleting *.dvi files
Message-ID: <1990Oct21.192643.503@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 21 Oct 90 19:26:43 GMT
References: <41724@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <1828@utodaycom>
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Reply-To: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 27

In article <1828@utodaycom>, sean@utodaycom (Sean Fulton) writes:
|> Try:
|> 	find . -name `*.dvi` -print -exec rm -f {} \;

  Backquotes won't do the right thing in any of the shells I've used.

  Backquotes are for command evaluation and output substitution, not for
wildcard quoting.  The command above will try to run a command called "*.dvi",
which will obviously fail.  Try:

	find . -name '*.dvi' -print -exec rm -f {} \;

Or, if you know there aren't that many of them, try:

	rm -rf `find . -name '*.dvi' -print`

Or, if you are unsure how many of them there are and you have xargs (and you
aren't worried about the xargs security holes that have been discussed
recently being present in your home directory :-):

	find . -name '*.dvi' -print | xargs rm -f

-- 
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