Why did this command delete everything?

Question

I run this command on a Unix box

find . name CVS -exec rm -fr {} \;

What i wanted to do is delete any file called CVS within any directory from the current directory and it deleted everything.

Fortunately all i had to do to recover is check out again from CVS. imagine if i specified / as the starting directory!

Edit

I think the reason it did that is because i used "name" instead of "-name". I just rerun it as

find . -name CVS -exec rm -fr {} \;

And it seem to work fine. What exactly happens if name is used as opposed to -name?

Answer 1

You're missing the dash before -name, hence it was looking for paths named name and CVS:

The find utility recursively descends the directory tree for each path listed.

You can easily test using

find . name CVS -exec echo rm -fr {} \;