rm to work on particular type of files recursively on a directory/partition

[svzard]

Hi,
I would like to know if 'rm' command can be used to remove particular type of files recursively from a directory or partition?

The reason I'm asking is that my pen drive is infected by a virus. I call it 'folder' virus. The virus creates an 'exe' file by the name of the folder/directory. The more folders you have the more trouble you are in. Of course I can use an anti-virus on windows, but I want to delete them from command line in linux.

ls /media/SV | grep exe

lists all those exe files in my pendrive. But I'm not able to delete them with same ease. I did,

rm -r /media/SV/*.exe

and expected that all the files with extension 'exe' will get deleted. It asked for confirmation once and I don't know what I typed. It gave an error "cannot delete /media/SV..." and came to prompt. Only then I realized that everything in my pendrive is deleted. Thankfully I had backed up the content on my hd.

I think 'rm' interpreted it as to remove the directory /media/SV instead of the 'filter' I set.

What is the correct format to do what I want to do?

Regards,
SV

[khafa]

there is no problem with the command you ran( even though you dont need the -r here given that you are deleting only files).
if you want it to delete without confirmation you just do

rm -f /media/SV/*.exe

[svzard]

Then why did my whole pen drive got wiped out. I don't remember typing anything extra...

[khafa]

its not easy to tell you why that happened without having seen all that went on. maybe you can browse your history and see what you really did

[svzard]

ok. may be i can try the same command on a test directory... some also instructed me to try out 'find, exec, xargs' options. will go thru man pages for them too.

thanks a lot buddy...

[khafa]

yeah find is safer given that you can run find to see if the result is what you want then you add -exec rm to remove them.
its a good idea going through the man pages.