Graham Lawrence wrote: > I appreciate the detailed response from Bob Proulx, but I do not think > it addressed the question I raised.
Please keep the discussion going until we have reached consensus. > I had expected "rm -rf *.swp" to remove all the files listed by > find, Mr Proulx informed me that it would have removed none of them, Not given the information discussed so far. :-) > but in fact what it did was remove SOME of them. What? That is very unexpected behavior! Please show us the result of these commands: echo *.swp ls -ldog *.swp What shell are you using? echo $0 echo $SHELL If that happens to turn out to be /bin/sh then please follow up by figuring out if /bin/sh is a symlink to a different shell. And if it isn't a symlink try to find out what shell it is really. ls -ldog /bin/sh Expansion of the '*.swp' is a function of your shell. So finding that information is critical to understanding the behavior. I am using bash. If you are using a different shell then the behavior could be quite different. But it would still be a function of the shell. What filesystem are you operating upon? Is it a local filesystem or a network mounted filesystem such as NFS or Samba? 'find' can print this information. find . -name '*.swp' -printf '%F %p\n' > For example, why did it remove > /home/g/.vim/renamer.sh.swp > but ignore > /home/g/.vim/backup.sh.swp I am unable to reproduce your results. I used the following setup actions to recreate your test case: mkdir g mkdir g/.vim touch g/.vim/config.swp touch g/.vim/Notes.swp touch g/.vim/nzb.sh.swp touch g/.vim/makesess.vim.swp touch g/.vim/backup.sh.swp touch g/.vim/.vimrc.swp touch g/.vim/.bashrc.swp touch g/.vim/renamer.sh.swp touch g/.vim/vimcht.swp touch g/.vim/grepnotes.sh.swp mkdir g/Scripts touch g/Scripts/.reseq.awk.swp mkdir g/.fluxbox touch g/.fluxbox/.menu.swp $ cd g $ find . -name '*.swp' ./.vim/.vimrc.swp ./.vim/vimcht.swp ./.vim/nzb.sh.swp ./.vim/Notes.swp ./.vim/config.swp ./.vim/makesess.vim.swp ./.vim/renamer.sh.swp ./.vim/backup.sh.swp ./.vim/.bashrc.swp ./.vim/grepnotes.sh.swp ./Scripts/.reseq.awk.swp ./.fluxbox/.menu.swp $ find . -name '*.swp' | wc -l 12 $ echo *.swp *.swp $ ls -ldog *.swp ls: cannot access *.swp: No such file or directory $ rm -rf *.swp $ find . -name '*.swp' | wc -l 12 Bob
