Delete all files with the same name as the ones that end in `.part`

It is incorrect for several reasons.

You did not restrict Find's depth

It will thus descend into subdirectories and delete matching files there too.

Easily solvable by adding -maxdepth 1 to each Find.

File names containing glob characters

This is an edge case scenario.

Consider this structure:

.
├── abc
├── abc.part
├── cde
└── c*e.part

The outermost Find will find

• abc.part, so base=abc and the innermost Find looks for files matching the glob abc*, which matches the abc file. Good.
• c*e.part, so base=c*e and the innermost Find looks for files matching the glob c*e*, which matches the cde file. Bad, because cde does not contain c*e.

File names with extra characters

If you have abcde and abc.part files, the former will be deleted because it matches abc* as should be clear from the previous case discussion.

This particular problem would be easily fixed by changing $base* -> $base.*.

Solutions

You only want to operate in the current directory, so why not

for f in *.part; do
    rm "${f%.part}."*
done

Here it is crucial not to quote the *, because we want it to act as a glob (and not literally).

${f%suffix} is a special form of parameter expansion available in all POSIX shells. It means "remove suffix from the expansion of f". It looks cleaner than Basename and doesn't spawn an extra process.

For something more along the lines you suggested,

find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.part' -exec sh -c 'rm "$(basename "$1" .part)".*' sh {} \;

But it looks considerably convoluted and -maxdepth 1 is not a POSIX specified option to Find, so you are also sacrificing portability. (It is possible to write the POSIX equivalent of -maxdepth 1 but it adds obscurity.)

posted 24 days ago

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