How do I remove all files that match a pattern?

Question

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

Take a look at https://superuser.com/a/699287/92334 – Ilya Serbis Oct 22 '18 at 21:07 — Ilya Serbis, Oct 22 '18 at 21:07

score 257 · Accepted Answer · answered May 18 '11 at 19:08

257

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.

answered May 18 '11 at 19:08

Oli

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Does that work recursively? – Frank Barcenas May 25 '13 at 22:15
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@FrankBarcenas Yeah - find does everything recursively. If you want to limit how that works, you can play with the `-maxdepth` or `-mindepth` arguments. – Oli May 26 '13 at 09:37
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Definitely leave the `-delete` at the _end_ of the flags. `find . -delete -name '*.orig'` will ignore the filter and clobber your whole directory. – Michael Nov 18 '15 at 17:02
How to take patterns from file i.e. `.gitignore` – kyb Jan 31 '18 at 18:28
@kyb It sounds like you want `git clean`. Maybe with `-i` or `-n` for safety? – Michael Aug 09 '18 at 20:30
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@Michael, yes. I already solved the problem with `git clean -fdx` – kyb Aug 10 '18 at 19:56
`find -type f ...` will prevent the warnings if a (non empty) dir happens to have a name like `*.orig`. – Déjà vu Sep 30 '18 at 08:14
Can it be done by `grep` command and then pipe it to `rm`? – kamal Dec 17 '18 at 13:58
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@kamal I'd probably still use find but with its `-regex` or `-iregex` predicates. Parsing filenames (when you're piping them around) can be hard to do safely sometimes. – Oli Dec 17 '18 at 14:29

score 25 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 07 '15 at 21:50

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

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

answered Dec 07 '15 at 21:50

user2038042

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What's the benefit over using `-delete`? – muru Dec 07 '15 at 22:25
@muru I suppose you'd get a prompt for each file if you remove -rf. – Peter Jul 12 '16 at 21:06
@Peter not necessarily. Even then, so? The answer uses `-rf`, and `find` has `-ok`. – muru Jul 12 '16 at 21:10
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@muru it looks like -delete does not remove folders – Andrii Karaivanskyi Jul 31 '18 at 22:06
@AndriiKaraivanskyi unless the deletion failed, it does. – muru Jul 31 '18 at 22:07
`rm -rf` will delete recursively directories, then `find` might try to navigate through deleted folders (errors displayed). Also, not sure OP wants to delete `.orig` directories that are likely to include files which are not `.orig`... – Déjà vu Sep 30 '18 at 08:11
I sign up to this site just that I could upvote this answer. The accepted answer didn't work, but this did the trick for me. Thank you kind sir – Felipe Centeno Dec 29 '21 at 18:16

score 13 · Answer 3 · answered May 29 '19 at 12:41

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

rm .nfs000000000*

answered May 29 '19 at 12:41

Taras Vaskiv

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score 5 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 04 '20 at 00:14

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

It's prudent to list all found files first & a nice way to single out any outliers — talentcat, Mar 08 '23 at 08:54

How do I remove all files that match a pattern?

4 Answers4