Oh dear, I'm classing myself as a geek. Well, if the name fits, ......

The way you have tried, the shell will expand *.back before trying to run the command. If you happend to have a file at the top level called this.back then the command actually run will become:-

Code:

find . -name this.back -exec file {} \; -exec rm -i {} \;

so you will not actually match anything other than the file at the top level.

The others are various errors. What jaiseaugustine has suggested is the correct format for you. It will pass in *.back as it is to the find command and then it can be used for pattern matching.

If there are no files at the top level, you might get away with it depending how your shell reacts, but if there is more that one file called *.back, e.g. this.back & that.back, then you will probably get the error:-

Code:

find: There is a missing conjunction

because the shell will try to run:-

Code:

find . -name that.back this.back -exec rm {} ;

I hope that this clarifies things a bit.



Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK