Question

I am new to Makefile. I was going through an existing makefile and couldn’t understand what it does. The line is as below.

find $(RELEASE_DIR) -depth -name  "*CVS" -exec rm -rf {} \;

find command is used to find the strings. But I could not understand what this line exactly do. Please help to understand.

Answer 1

The find command is there to search for files in a given directory.

find <directory> -option1 -option2

The option -name "*CVS" says that the command will search for files with CVS in the end of their name.

-depth means that the directories are traversed with the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth-first_search method.

-exec rm -rf {} \; tells find to execute the command rm -rf for every file that was found. {} is a placeholder for the currently found file and \; marks the end of the rm command.