Deleting Files and Directories Safely in Linux

I was first exposed to UNIX-based operating systems in college during the Dark Ages (around 1991). At that time if you wanted to remove files or directories you used the rm command (or rmdir). That command is very powerful and such power led to a lot of unrecoverable files and crying undergrads as there typically was no recycle bin.

Here’s a modern and much safer alternative (that can still leverage rm): the Linux find command. I’ll leave the deep discussion to your friendly neighborhood man pages but here are the highlights:

• The find command is recursive
• The name parameter supports wildcards, e.g. *.txt
• Can search for multiple entity types, e.g. files, directories, etc.
• Easily see what you’re deleting before you delete it using the same command.

EXAMPLES

Find all files named “filename” in the current directory and any sub-directories (you can omit the starting location “period” if you’re searching the current directory):

find . -name "filename" -type f

To delete these same files, append a -delete parameter. This parameter MUST be the last parameter in the command.

find . -name "filename" -type f -delete

Find all directories and sub-directories with a certain name:

find . -name "__pycache__" -type d

Delete those same directories, sub-directories and any contained files (hello, rm!):

find . -name "__pycache__" -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;

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