Welcome to the tutorial on how to successfully fuck up with find, the command line tool. In case you’re not familiar with the find command, RTFM, it’s freaking beautiful. However, in the hands of a non-RTFM-ing user (like me) it can be quite destructive. Let me demonstrate.

I wanted to use find to delete a bunch of files from a hierarchy, based on a simple name rule. So I thought I should use xargs in combination with find to delete them. After a quick lookup of the -print0 and -name arguments of the find command, I concluded that it would be a good idea to run the following command:

1

$ find . -print0 -name example | xargs -0 rm

Can you guess what it did? Let me help you: it deleted all the files under .. The directories are still there, but they’re not any help, are they? Now, fortunately for me, this was in a git repository that I had just pushed to a remote, so I was able to just clone it again.

In order to understand what happened, I had to actually read the man page carefully and pay attention. Apparently, everything that comes after the path (in my case .) on the command line is treated as an expression by find, where every argument evaluates to true or false, and is ORed with the next one. The -print0 argument always returns true, because it’s only meant to change the output, not the actual filtering. Because of this, my -name argument was completely ignored.

To conclude, the correct command would have been:

1

$ find . -name example -print0 | xargs -0 rm

This way, the -name argument will take precedence over print0. However, because I actually spent time reading the manual this time, I discovered find also has a -delete argument, so xargs is not actually needed at all:

1

$ find . -name example -delete

As I was saying, freaking beautiful.