Why did this command delete everything?

Question

I run this command on a Unix box:

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

I wanted to delete any file called CVS within any directory from the current directory and it deleted everything.

Fortunately all I had to do to recover was check out again from CVS. Imagine if I specified / as the starting directory!

I think the reason is that 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, where the dot references the current folder, hence deleting all.

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

You can easily test by using echo before the command you want to run:

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