How to recursively delete multiple files with different extensions?

Question

I am trying to write a command to remove recursively several files with different extensions (*.extension1, *.extension2 etc) from the current directory and all its related sub-directories.

So far I got this command from another post but I couldn't workout how to adapt it to more than one file in the same command line:

find . -name "*.extension1" -type f -delete

Is it as simple as below?

find . -name "*.extension1";"*.extension2" -type f -delete

Just as a side note, these are all output files that I do not need, but not all are necessarily always output so some of the extensions might not be present. This is just as a general clean-up command.

Answer 1

find . \( -name "*.extension1" -o -name "*.extension2" \) -type f -delete

find Documents ( -name ".py" -o -name ".html" ) -exec file {} \;

OR

find . -regextype posix-egrep -regex ".*\.(extension1|extension2)$" -type f -delete

Answer 2

Just add more options. A regex solution can also apply but this one's better and safer.

find . \( -name '*.ext1' -or -name '*.ext2' \) -type f -delete

Edit: You probably need -or as well. Before deleting, test it first without the -delete option. (2) Added a pair of () as suggested by gniourf_gniourf.

Answer 3

Maybe regexp will help you

find . -regextype posix-awk -regex "(.*.ext1|.*.ext2)" -type f -delete

Answer 4

This simple command will delete all the files with extension1 and extension2 recursively in that directory. rm find . -name *.extension1 -o -name *.extentions2