0

I have the following directory listing:

 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Sep 2 15:19 aws.greengrass.LambdaLauncher.log 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Sep 2 15:19 aws.greengrass.LambdaRuntimes.log 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Sep 2 14:53 aws.greengrass.Nucleus.log 80 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 75017 Sep 2 15:55 greengrass_2022_09_02_15_0.log 40 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 36930 Sep 2 16:50 greengrass_2022_09_02_16_0.log 216 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 217065 Sep 2 20:40 greengrass_2022_09_02_20_0.log 96 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 92764 Sep 2 21:54 greengrass_2022_09_02_21_0.log 64 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 58307 Sep 2 22:57 greengrass_2022_09_02_22_0.log 48 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 46475 Sep 6 14:37 greengrass_2022_09_06_14_0.log 16 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14845 Sep 6 17:57 greengrass_2022_09_06_17_0.log 40 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 39037 Sep 6 18:11 greengrass_2022_09_06_18_0.log 184 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 186318 Sep 6 19:48 greengrass_2022_09_06_19_0.log 12 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10793 Sep 6 20:25 greengrass_2022_09_06_20_0.log 124 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 122363 Sep 6 21:43 greengrass.log

I want to delete any file who's name starts with greengrass. I have tried these wildcard commands but none of them work:

sudo rm /greengrass/v2/logs/greengrass*.* sudo rm /greengrass/v2/logs/greengrass* sudo rm /greengrass/v2/logs/greengrass*.log

I get:

rm: cannot remove '/greengrass/v2/logs/greengrass*.*': No such file or directory
Improve this question
2

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
3

What is happening is all about glob expansion.

when you run:

 sudo rm dir/*

the shell running the sudo tries to expand the '*' wildcard. If it cannot read the directory, then it passes the wildcard to sudo as is.

sudo executes rm with dir/* and rm does not do glob expansion, only shells do. rm is looking for a file called * which is a legal (but unusual) filename.

If the directory was readable by the user running sudo, then the acutall sudo command would be:

sudo rm dir/filea dir/fileb dir/filec

which would have worked. since you want root to do the glob expansion you will need to use a shell as follows

sudo sh -c "rm dir/*"

Then sudo will run a shell as root, that will run the command "rm dir/*" since shell understand how to expand globs, then it will be turned into "rm dir/filea dir/fileb ..."

Improve this answer
0

Is the directory /greengrass/v2/logs readable by your regular user? If not, it'll do this because the wildcard needs to be expanded to a list of matching files by the shell (before it's passed to sudo, which passes it on to rm), and if the shell can't list the contents of the directory... that doesn't happen.

The easiest solution is probably to use sudo -s to open a root shell, then run rm /greengrass/v2/logs/greengrass*.* from that root shell. And then use either exit or Control-D to exit the root shell and go back to normal.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.