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Accepted
JD Isaacks
Asked: 2011-05-19 11:04:16 +0800 CST

How do I remove all files that match a pattern?

  • 772

When I revert in Mercurial, it leaves several .orig files. I would like to be able to run a command to remove all of them.

I have found some sources that say to run:

rm **/*.orig

But that gives me the message:

rm: cannot remove `**/*.orig': No such file or directory

I have also tried these commands:

rm -rv *.orig
rm -R *\.orig
uninstall

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Use the find command (with care!)

    find . -name '*.orig' #-delete

    I've commented out the delete command but once you're happy with what it's matching, just remove the # from the line and it should delete all those files.

    • 230

  2. "find" has some very advanced techniques to search through all or current directories and rm files.

    find ./ -name ".orig" -exec rm -rf {} \;
    • 21

  3. I have removed all files that starts with .nfs000000000 like this 

    rm .nfs000000000*
    • 9

  4. The below is what I would normally do

    find ./ -name "*.orig" | xargs rm -r

    It's a good idea to check what files you'll be deleting first by checking the xargs. The below will print out the files you've found.

    find ./ -name "*.orig" | xargs

    If you notice a file that's been found that you don't want to delete either tweak your initial find or add a grep -v step, which will omit a match, ie

    find ./ -name "*.orig" | grep -v "somefiletokeep.orig" | xargs rm -r
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