That is, we’ll execute the rm command one million times if the find command finds a million files. When we use this approach, an rm process will be executed for each file the find command has found. Using find -execįirst, let’s explain how the find -exec rm approach works. If we do, it can delete files unexpectedly. When we use the find command, we should keep in mind that we should never put the -delete action at the first position. First, it removes all files under a directory, then the empty directory itself, until everything has been removed. Therefore, if we put -delete as the first option, it’ll start deletion from each directory tree’s very bottom. The -depth option asks the find command to search each directory’s contents before the directory itself. This is because the -delete action implies the -depth option. If the -delete action is at the first position, during its evaluation, it’ll delete the given directory and everything in it, which is the test directory in our example.īut wait - we’ve just learned the -delete action won’t remove non-empty directories. However, we shouldn’t forget that find treats them as three expressions as well.Īn expression in the find command will be evaluated, returning a boolean value, and the -delete action always returns true. We can call the three options: -delete, -type d, and -name ‘.git’.

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