How to delete *.class files from all subdirectories?

www wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I forgot how to delete all *.class files (Java classes) from the current
> and all the subdirectories.

find . -name "*.class" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f


Janis

>
> I thought it is:
> rm -Rf *.class
>
> But to my surprise, it didn't work.
>
> Thank you.

On Apr 17, 12:19 pm, www wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I forgot how to delete all *.class files (Java classes) from the current
> and all the subdirectories.
>
> I thought it is:
> rm -Rf *.class
>
> But to my surprise, it didn't work.
>
> Thank you.

find . -name "*.class"|xargs rm -rf

2007-04-17, 12:19(-04), www:
> Hi,
>
> I forgot how to delete all *.class files (Java classes) from the current
> and all the subdirectories.
>
> I thought it is:
> rm -Rf *.class
>
> But to my surprise, it didn't work.
[...]

Once you know it's the shell, not rm that expands *.class into a
list of file names, it shouldn't be a surprise anymore.

Some shells (zsh and recent versions of ksh93 with the -G
option) have recursive globbing:

rm -- **/*.class

But you could also use find.

find . -name '*.class' -exec rm {} +

But not that it will delete hidden files as well. If you don't
want it:

find . -name '*.class' ! -name '.*' -exec rm {} +

Or if you do want to remove them with zsh:

rm -- **/*.class(D)

If you don't want to remove .class *directories*:

rm -- **/*.class(^/)
(there's no equivalent with ksh93 though)

or

find . -name '*.class' ! -type d -exec rm {} +

--
Stéphane

On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:19:03 -0400, www
wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I forgot how to delete all *.class files (Java classes) from the current
> and all the subdirectories.
>
> I thought it is:
> rm -Rf *.class
>
> But to my surprise, it didn't work.
>
> Thank you.

find . -name '*.class' -exec rm {} +
with some older versions of find:
find . -name '*.class' | xargs rm

rm -rf can delete a directory and all its contents. Unquoted wildcards
are replaced by matching filenames in the current directory before the
command is executed.


--
"Freedom is still the most radical idea of all."
-- Nathaniel Branden

2007-04-17, 16:59(+00), Bill Marcum:
[...]
> find . -name '*.class' -exec rm {} +
> with some older versions of find:
> find . -name '*.class' | xargs rm
[...]

But xargs is not meant to process find's output (unless you use
the non-standard -0 and find's -print0).

xargs expects its input in a very specific format, and that's
not a newline separated list as in find's output. Anyway,
strictly speaking is not post-processable as nothing prevents a
file path to contain a newline character itself.

So:

find . -name '*.class' | xargs rm

only works in the very specific case where none of the file
paths contain any space, tab, newline, backslash, single or
double quote characters.

So it's OK for a one of if you know the file names don't contain
such characters. But that's certainly not a command line you
should put in scripts for instance.

--
Stéphane