Question

How can I remove all dirs that start with a prefix, So I have something like this

• xyzdirblah
• xyzdir2
• xyzdir3
• xyzdir4
• ..more

want to do via adb shell , android

Answer 1

rm -rf xyzdir*

rm is the command to delete things.

-r means recursively delete directories.
-f means don’t ask questions, and don’t complain.
-rf means both of those things together.

xyzdir* expands to the names of files that start with “xyzdir” (including directory names, since in Unix-like systems — including Android — directories are really just a special kind of file.)

If there are nondirectory files with the same prefix, like “xyzdir.txt”, which you don’t want to remove, you have to be more careful:

for i in xyzdir*; do [ -d $i ] && rm -rf $i; done

This loops over every file-or-directory with a name starting with “xyzdir” (the for i in part), checks whether it is a directory (the [ -d $i ] part), and if so (the && part), removes it recursively (the rm -rf $i part).