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Date:      Sun, 17 Mar 2002 09:33:22 -0500 (EST)
From:      Dru <genisis@istar.ca>
To:        Tim Kellers <timothyk@serv1.wallnet.com>
Cc:        Roman Neuhauser <neuhauser@mobil.cz>, "Kellers, Timothy" <kellers@ADM.NJIT.EDU>, "'questions@freebsd.org'" <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, "'kellers@njit.edu'" <kellers@njit.edu>
Subject:   Re: desktop.eml and sample.eml
Message-ID:  <20020317092424.N1643-100000@genisis>
In-Reply-To: <20020316221004.J49217-100000@serv1.wallnet.com>

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On Sat, 16 Mar 2002, Tim Kellers wrote:

>
> Using find, is this command safe?
>
> find / -name "sample.eml" -delete
>
> I've read (and re-read) the man page for find and I'm still a bit skittish
> about the -delete function.  And while I have used find often before, I've
> never used the -delete argument.  When I tried it earlier this evening on
> my home computer, I wiped out my home directory.  (I figured out my
> boneheaded syntax after that one).
>
> I can't afford to wipe out the school's server, though, so any suggestions
> (or different approaches) to deleting these miserable virus droppings.
>
> Thanks,

<snip>

Hi Tim,

If you're concerned about inadvertantly nuking other files, there's a
couple of ways you can verify what will be deleted before doing the
delete. You could become the superuser and cd into / and try this:

su
cd /
find . -name "*.eml" -print > somefile

then skim over the resulting somefile. If it looks good, use this command
to remove the files:

find . -name "*.eml" -delete

An alternative is to use the "ok" switch which will prompt you for every file
it finds, asking your permission before deleting it. A bit slower, but you'll
know which files will get deleted:

find . -name "*.eml" -ok rm {} \;

HTH,

Dru




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