Unix recursive delete files

I wanted to delete files and folder recursively from a particular folder so I ran this command from that folder. Something bad happened after that my server is down, not even getting ping response. Don't forget the possibility that the server being unreachable after the rm command had nothing to do with that. It could be a coincidence! Most likely though, the current working directory was not what you thought, when the command was issued. If the rm that was invoked was the standard rm command, it first parses the arguments, one by one, treating all arguments including ones resulting from shell globbing that begin with a - as options until it comes to an argument that does not begin with a - except for commands using GNU getopt that accept options after non-options , or one that is exactly Everything after that is considered file names.

In other words, if you had a file called for example --no-preserve-root in the current directory, that would have been interpreted as an option to rm , not as a file name to remove! Be careful with wildcards and with file naming.

In other words, if you had a file called --no-preserve-root , that would have been passed as an option to rm , not as a file name. Or simply use absolute or relative path names to make the filenames begin with something other than - , as in: rm.

There is also a -i flag to rm that makes it prompt "interactively" before removing anything. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams?

Learn more. Ask Question. I want to place all the files to be deleted in delete. Please help me with this script as am new to unix scripting. Delete specific parts in a. Hi all, I desperately need a small script which deletes everything in a particular. Delete files whose file names are listed in a. I used this command to list all the log files which are for more than 10 days to a text file. Anyone can help me Delete file2. Script to delete all something. There are some files in a directory like a.

I want to delete all these files inside that directory and sub directory. How can i do this? Command to delete numbers at beginning of txt file line. RedHat Commands. OpenSolaris Commands. Linux Commands. SunOS Commands. Join Date: Oct Is this what you were looking for? Join Date: May Use ls -R and then test whether it is a file. Copy files recursively to one single directory. I need to copy a complete directory structure into a new location.

But I want to have all files copied into one directory and leave out the directory structure. So all files must be placed in one directory.

I found many scripts in the web of achieving this. Is there anything wrong with the command? How to recursively copy directory only for recent files? I love the -newerct flag for the Cygwin find command on windows. Recursively cat files in a directory with filename printed first.

I want to recursively cat the content of files in a directory e. Display the number of files in a directory and recursively in each subdirectory. Got a sun cluser global mount point which takes ages to mount everytime, need to understand Problem with script generating files in directory recursively. I have a script which generates recursively some files in folders for a given root folder.