Unix command deleted every directory even though not specified

bash, linux, rm, unix, xargs

Solution

The `ls -l` command gave a list of all the subdirectories in your current present-working-directory (PWD).

The `rm` command can delete multiple files/directories if you pass them to it as a list.

eg: `rm test1.txt test2.txt myApp` will delete all three of the files with names:

test1.txt
test2.txt
myApp

Also, the flags for the `rm` command you used are common in many a folly. `rm -f` - Force deletion of files without asking or confirming `rm -r` - Recurse into all subdirectories and delete all their contents and subdirectories

So, let's say you are in /home/user, and the directory structure looks like so:

 /home/user
|->dir1
|->dir2
`->file1.txt

the `ls -l` command will provide the list containing `"dir1 dir2 file1.txt"`, and the result of the command `ls -l | xargs rm -rf` will look like this: `rm -rf dir1 dir2 file1.txt`

If we expand your original question with the example above, the final command that gets passed to the system becomes: `rm -rf di1 dir2 file1.txt bark.*`

So, everything in the current directory gets wiped out, so the `bark.*` is redundant (you effectively told the machine to destroy everything in the current directory anyway).

I think what you meant to do was delete all files in the current directory and all subdirectories (recurse) that start with `bark.` To do that, you just have to do: `find -iname bark.* | xargs rm`

The command above means "find all files in this directory and subdirectories, ignoring UPPERCASE/lowercase/mIxEdCaSe, that start with the characters "bark.", and delete them". This could still be a bad command if you have a typo, so to be sure, you should always test before you do a batch-deletion like this.

In the future, first do the following to get a list of all the files you will be deleting first to confirm they are the ones you want deleted. `find -iname bark.* | xargs echo`

Then if you are sure, delete them via `find -iname bark.* | xargs rm`

Hope this helps.

As a humorous note, one of the most famous instances of "rm -rf" can be found here: https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/commit/a047be85247755cdbe0acce6f1dafc8beb84f2ac

An automated script runs something like `rm -rf /usr/local/.........`, but due to accidentally inserting a space, the command became `rm -rf /usr /local/......`, so this effectively means "delete all root folders that start with usr or local", effectively destroying the system of anyone who uses it. I feel bad for that developer.

You can avoid these kinds of bugs by quoting your strings, ie: `rm -rf "/usr/ local/...."` would have provided an error message and avoided this bug, because the quotes mean that everything between them is the full path, NOT a list of separate paths/files (ie: you are telling rm that the file/folder has a SPACE character in its name).

Problem

Original source