Linux – bash – directories ending in . and whitespace cannot be removed

If you look at the function _cd() in /etc/bash_completion, you'll see that it appends the trailing slash itself and that complete gets called with the option -o nospace for cd.

You can do the same for xyz, but to have to verify separately if the found match is a directory (if so, append slash) or a file (if so, append space). This should be done in a for loop to process all found matches.

Also, to properly handle paths that contain spaces, you have to set the internal file separator to only newline and escape the spaces. Using IFS=$'\n' in combination with printf %q makes completion work with almost all characters.¹ Special care has to be taken to not escape the trailing space.

The following should work:

_xyz ()
{
    local IFS=$'\n'
    local LASTCHAR=' '

    COMPREPLY=($(compgen -o plusdirs -f -X '!*.txt' \
        -- "${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"))

    if [ ${#COMPREPLY[@]} = 1 ]; then
        [ -d "$COMPREPLY" ] && LASTCHAR=/
        COMPREPLY=$(printf %q%s "$COMPREPLY" "$LASTCHAR")
    else
        for ((i=0; i < ${#COMPREPLY[@]}; i++)); do
            [ -d "${COMPREPLY[$i]}" ] && COMPREPLY[$i]=${COMPREPLY[$i]}/
        done
    fi

    return 0
}

complete -o nospace -F _xyz xyz

_{¹ The newline character is the obvious exception here, since it is an internal file separator.}

xargs does all the magic:

find . -name test -type d -print0|xargs -0 rm -r --

xargs executes the command passed as parameters, with the arguments passed to stdin.

This is using rm -r to delete the directory and all its children.

The -- denotes the end of the arguments, to avoid a path starting with - from being treated as an argument.

-print0 tells find to print \0 characters instead of newlines; and -0 tells xargs to treat only \0 as argument separator.

This is calling rm with many directories at once, avoiding the overhead of calling rm separately for each directory.

As an alternative, find can also run a command for each selected file:

find . -name test -type d -exec rm -r {} \;

And this one, with better performance, since it will call rm with multiple directories at once:

find . -name test -type d -exec rm -r {} +

(Note the + at the end; this one is equivalent to the xargs solution.)