php，exec，shell exec，rm不能lstat

Question

I am on WIN7, using PHP and Gnu CoreUtils 5.3.0 I need to delete recursively from a folder with mask, in instance all *.php and *.txt files.

exec(
    'rm -rf ../root_compressed/*.php *.txt'
    //.' '.$SILENT
    , $out, $ret);

if($ret)
    die("
ERROR!!!
");

This one fails with rm: cannot lstat `*.txt': Invalid argument

Now using

shell_exec(
    'rm -rf ../root_compressed/*.php *.txt'
    //.' '.$SILENT
);

This works.

I need exec() since I'd like to know if success or not. What is the problem with rm?

Answer 1

If the *.txt files are also located in the root_compressed folder, you need to include that as well in your rm command:

exec(
    'rm -rf ../root_compressed/*.php ../root_compressed/*.txt'
    //.' '.$SILENT
    , $out, $ret);

You can also use curly brace expansion if your server supports it:

exec(
    'rm -rf ../root_compressed/*.{php,txt}'
    , $out, $ret);

Note that the recursive flag (-r) on the rm command won't do much in this case, since you're only looking explicitly for *.php and *.txt entries. So unless your subfolders are named like that, this will not recursively delete all *.php and *.txt from every subfolder in the root_compressed folder.

I tried getting a one-liner command to do that using find, but I couldn't get it to accept two file types in one argument. You'd have to use something like find ../root_compressed -type f -name "*.php" -delete multiple times for each file type you want to delete.

However, it's quite easy to script it yourself using the SPL library:

$dir_iterator = new RecursiveDirectoryIterator("../root_compressed");
$iterator = new RecursiveIteratorIterator($dir_iterator, RecursiveIteratorIterator::SELF_FIRST);

foreach ($iterator as $file) {
    if ($file->isFile() && preg_match("~\.(php|txt)$~i", $file->getFilename())) {
        unlink($file->getRealpath());
    }
}