Removing files of a specific extension unix

Question

Quick question, how do I recursively remove files of a specific extension? I wish to remove all .svn folders from a project.

rm -Rf www/ "*.svn"

The above seems to remove everything. Im using FreeBSD.

Thanks

Answer 1

Ensure that you are happy with the list first.

find www -name '.svn' -type d -ls

Restrict to directories. SVN always names them .svn.

find www -depth -name '.svn' -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;

Answer 2

I like to use the xargs command, i find it more intuitive, so:

find www -name '.svn' -type d -print0 | xargs -0 rm -r

if you want to remove .svn folders, if you are interested in deleting files:

find www -name '.svn' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm

or you can remove everything:

find www -name '.svn' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -r

if you want to be sure of what you will delete, launch the find command without the xargs :-)

good luck!

Answer 3

chdir to the the working directory and run:

find . -iname '.svn' -exec rm -fr {} \;

OR you can specify the path directory like this:

find path -iname '.svn' -exec rm -fr {} \;

Answer 4

By typing :

rm -Rf www/ "*.svn"

You ask to remove the www folder and every *.svn files.

What you certainly want is to remove every *.svn inside the www folder, so you should use:

rm -Rf www/*.svn

(without the space)

Answer 5

you should use svn export _url_ instead of svn checkout _url_

Answer 6

not sure if this is the best way to get rid of a repository, but this should do what you need:

find www -name "*.svn" -exec rm -rfv {} \;

Update: here is a nice description of BSD's find.