pr0gr4mm3r — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 14:31:05 +0000

My Bluefish program is configured to delete backup files upon closing. It doesn't like to listen.

That command works! Thanks so much.

02bunced — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 08:08:44 +0000

Thanks JeevesBond - long time since I've used Linux so my command line knowledge is failing . . .

JeevesBond — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 06:22:40 +0000

Just had a look at Bluefish, to make it delete the backups on exit, go to Edit -> Preferences -> Files -> Backup -> Remove backup file on close (it's a checkbox).

Otherwise you can just use the commands above, changing the preferences does seem easier though.

JeevesBond — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 06:18:44 +0000

The easiest way to solve this is to get Bluefish to delete all it's backup files when it closes.

This definitely doesn't require a bash script: just use the pipe! This should work:
find . -type f -name '*~' | xargs rm -f'
So [incode]find . -type f -name '*~'[/incode] finds (the [incode]-type f[/incode] bit) any files in the current directory (the dot after the find), which have a name ending with '*~'. The pipe symbol [incode]|[/incode] then sends the results of the find to [incode]xargs rm -f[/incode], xargs gets the results and calls [incode]rm -f[/incode] for each file, which deletes them.

The find command is recursive.

A while ago I always used to login to my Linux box as root, that was until I typed: [incode]rm -rf /[/incode] by accident. Big mistake.

pr0gr4mm3r — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 21:52:27 +0000

Ok, I see now. Thanks for the clarification.

I've never written any bash scripts to do something complex like that. If anybody would be able to come up with something that would work, I would appreciate it. Otherwise, I can do it in PHP.

02bunced — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 21:09:30 +0000

Yes, but it won't search through the subdirectories, it just works on the sub-directory names. This boils down to the Linux theory that everything is a file, therefore, it sees the subdirectories as a file only. So, if you had a subdirectory with the name "Project1~", the directory would be deleted, but it wouldn't search through it.

To do that, you'd need to set up a bash script to get the number of subdirectories in the folder, to 'cd' into each one, remove all the folders, cd back to the root again and repeat for each directory.

pr0gr4mm3r — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 18:55:31 +0000

That actually works, but only in the current directory. Doesn't the -r switch mean recursive (delete in all subdirectories)?

02bunced — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 18:45:10 +0000

Does rm -rf *~ work any better