Difference between 'find -delete' and 'rm -rf'?

Question

I want to delete files from a specific directory recursively. So, I have used

find . -wholename "*.txt" -delete

We can also delete the files using

rm -rf *.txt

What is the difference between deletion of file using rm and find ??

Answer 1

find . -name abd.txt -delete tries to remove all files named abd.txt that are somewhere in the directory tree of .

find . -wholename abd.txt -delete tries to remove all files with a full pathname of abd.txt somewhere in the directory tree of .

No such files will ever exist: when using find ., all full pathnames of files found will start with ./, so even a file in the current directory named abd.txt will have path ./abd.txt, and it will not match.

find . -wholename ./abd.txt -delete will remove the file in the current directory named abd.txt.

find -wholename ./abd.txt -delete will do the same.

The removal will fail if abd.txt is a nonempty directory.

(I just tried the above with GNU find 4.6.0; other versions may behave differently.)

rm -rf abd.txt also tries to remove abd.txt in the current directory, and if it is a nonempty directory, it will remove it, and everything in it.

To do this with find, you might use

find . -depth \( -wholename ./abd.txt -o -wholename ./abd.txt/\* \) -delete