Question

I have to remove few hundreds of files inside my C code. I use “remove” in a loop. Is there any faster way to do it than using “remove”? I ask this because I can’t give wildchars using “remove”.

Answer 1

No, there isn’t a quicker way than using remove() – or unlink() on POSIX systems – in a loop.

The system rm command does that too – at least in the simple, non-recursive case where the names are given on the command line. The shell expands the metacharacters, and rm (in)famously goes along deleting what it was told to delete, unaware of the disastrous *.* notation that was used on the command line. (In the recursive case, it uses a function such as nftw() to traverse the directory structure in depth-first order and repeated calls to unlink() to remove the files and rmdir() to remove the (now-empty) directories.)

POSIX does provide functions (glob() and wordexp()) to generate lists of file names from metacharacters as used in the (POSIX) shell, plus fnmatch() to see whether a name matches a pattern.