Your two commands recursively remove directories that match the pattern. The patterns are:-Oddly, this means the same as pattern /home/?*/folder_* when you run them sequentially, however this might have been done if there are many matches and when expanded the overall rm command exceeds the maximum command length. It also ignores anything that matches zero characters for the intermediate directory, such as /home/folder_1

Consider this instead:-

Code:

find /home -name "folder_*" -exec echo rm -rf {} \;

This will search for files (be they regular files, pipes, directories, sockets etc.) under /home called or starting folder_ and remove them if you drop the echo

This will, however remove items called /home/robin/saved/folder_1 too.

You can limit this to just look for directories by adding a -type d clause.
You can limit the depth it will search to using the -mindepth & -maxdepth clauses if your version of find supports them. If find doesn't support them, you might have to force it some other way, such as with an extended regular expression of some sort.


I encourage you to safely have a go and tell us if you get stuck. Only let the rm run once you are sure it will do exactly what you want.

Does this help?

Robin