How to use “rm” to remove files with a “:” in them?

Question

I am using Ubuntu 10.04, and I have a directory with a bunch of files. We changed the naming scheme of the files a while ago, and now I want to delete all the old ones.

New Name scheme: December_12_2010.zip

Old Name Scheme: December_11_2010_17:54:18_map.zip

I was looking through regular expressions, and I want to see how to do it with them, but I couldn't figure it out. My limited knowledge wasn't enough to get me the right combination. I saw the ":" and thought the best way to delete the files was to say "Delete all files with a ':' in them", but no luck. I would love some guidance!

Answer 1

Try rm *:*. That certainly works for me and if it doesn't work for you it would help if you provided the details of the error message.

It would also be possible to rename the files if there's only one per day. Automating that wouldn't be a major challenge.

Answer 2

If the files are really a bunch you should use find instead:

find -name '*:*' -delete

Answer 3

If you're after a regex, this should work:-

find . -regex '.*/*[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]*' -exec rm -fv '{}' \;