Re [Gllug] rm -R not working on Fedora

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 08:34:59PM +0000, Garry Heaton wrote:
> 
> For example, I enter a directory in which I own all the files and files are
> 0644. I issue the command:
> 
> rm -R *.php.bak
> 
> Example 1
> All the '.php.bak' files within the current directory are removed but none
> within the subdirectories, despite having the same file permissions.

The wildcards get expanded by your shell before being passed to 'rm'. So
if you have foo.php.bak in the current directory, then the above command
will expand to:

  rm -R foo.php.bak

To avoid this, you need to quote the arguments:

  rm -R '*.php.bak'

> Example 2
> I enter my home diretory and issue these commands:
> 
> mkdir exdir
> cd exdir
> touch file1.txt
> mkdir subdir
> cd subdir
> touch file2.txt
> cd ..
> rm -R *.txt
> 
> Result: file1.txt is removed but file2.txt remains

When, you are in 'exdir' your command expands to

  rm -R file1.txt

Which obviously won't match 'subdir/file2.txt', so again
you need to quote the command

  rm -R '*.txt'

Regards,
Dan.
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