Linux – Delete all directory that begin with a particular string

Yes, rm *.xvg will only delete the files with the specified extension in your current directory.

A good way to make sure you are indeed in the directory you want delete your files is to use the pwd command which will display your current directory and then do an ls to verify you find the files you are expecting.

If you are bit apprehensive about issuing the rm command, there are 2 things you can do:

1. type ls *.xvg to see a list of what files would be affected by this command.

2. Unless you have a lot of files, you could always also use the -i command line switch for rm (also exists for cp and mv). Using rm -i *.xvg would prompt you for each individual file if it was ok to delete it, so you could be sure nothing you didn't expect was getting deleted. (This will be tedious if you have a lot of files though :)

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.

Were you root when doing this?

This is what happens when issuing the command rm -rf *:

1. The shell resolves the wildcard patterns (* in this case) to all files (including directories, symbolic links and device special files) that matches the used globbing pattern, in this case everything not beginning with a . Normally, these are sorted "alphabetically" by the shell.
2. The shell then forks a new process and exec()s the first version of rm found in your $PATH, with -rf as the first argument, and the matched files, one by one as the consecutive arguments.

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). If you have a file called -r in the current directory, the command ls * would list the other files in reverse order, and not show the '-r' file.

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.

Use rm -rf -- * to prevent that from happening, and also remove the files beginning with -. Or simply use absolute or relative path names to make the filenames begin with something other than -, as in: rm ./--flagfile or rm /abs/path/to/--flagfile.

There is also a -i flag to rm that makes it prompt ("interactively") before removing anything.