swift delete *

[Dafna Ron]

when I run swift delete * we get a list of some object that supposedly do not exist that swift is trying to delete.
none of the containers or object under them are deleted:

[root@nott-vdsa tmp(keystone_admin)]# swift delete *
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-0Bdj_F' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-2YKYcR' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-59724W' not found
Object 'admin/create_horizon.txt' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-62Gzvk' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-6Wu8Z6' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-BVrPwz' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-CtP4UA' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-E_hCiX' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-CjKRGD' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-emzPOA' not found
Object 'admin/file.tar.gz' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-hf66GT' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-junmx6' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-lx4Ig6' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-KBYxY2' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-mBgRBf' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-kKTroh' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-nova' not found
Object 'admin/initrd.img' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-pd82DZ' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-SqdO2x' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-njDZF2' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-olPTxr' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-tmBNUN' not found
Object 'admin/glance' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-uJ8zIo' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-v9POs9' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-qZYe4J' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-vAifQZ' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-uhVbvH' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-Z0uGYQ' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-u9JMlw' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-Uu4vww' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-2effZE' not found
Object 'admin/ks-script-uLSgyo.log' not found
Object 'admin/keystone-signing-yOe71a' not found
Object 'admin/glance-api.conf' not found
Object 'admin/test2' not found
Object 'admin/packstack-answers-20130924-140637.txt' not found
Object 'admin/yum.log' not found
Object 'admin/test1' not found
Object 'admin/rhel-server-x86_64-kvm-6.4_20130130.0-2-sda.qcow2' not found
Object 'admin/ks-script-uLSgyo' not found
Object 'admin/test3' not found
Object 'admin/file' not found
Object 'admin/glance1' not found
Object 'admin/image' not found
[root@nott-vdsa tmp(keystone_admin)]# swift list
dafna
haha
lala
lala1
test
test1
[root@nott-vdsa tmp(keystone_admin)]# swift list dafna
file.tar.gz
test1
test2
test3
tmp/glance-api.conf
tmp/ks-script-uLSgyo.log
[root@nott-vdsa tmp(keystone_admin)]#

[gholt (gholt)]

Have you heard of file name globbing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming)

[Samuel Merritt (torgomatic)]

As gholt said, that's your shell expanding "*", and has nothing to do with Swift or swiftclient.

[Dave Neary (dneary)]

Hi,

Filesystem globbing doesn't traverse the subdirectories - why doesn't it just show an error for trying to delete the objkect "admin"? Obviously Swift is expanding the directory entries there. What's the appropriate way to pass a * into Swift without globbing?

Dave.

[Dafna Ron (dron-3)]

gholt, yes I have heard of globbing :) luckily I don't take things to heart but someone with thinner skin may have take this question badly ;)

[Chmouel Boudjnah (chmouel)]

What happen here is that you are doing a :

swift delete *

when you look at the swift help for delete :

,----
| $ swift delete --help
| Usage: Delete a container or objects within a container
|
| Positional arguments:
| <container> Name of container to delete from
| <object> Name of object to delete. Specify multiple times
| for multiple objects
`----

so the first arg is a container and the object is the list of objects.

I would guess that you have a directory admin keystone-signing-* and other files, so basically when you do the star which would do the ordering alphabetically and pick up admin as first (letter a) you say:

delete all those other objects in the admin directory

and swiftclient just try it and tells you that it fails.

@Dave if you want to delete with globbing like you says you can just delete the container directly and it would delete everything underdeath.

[Dafna Ron (dron-3)]

Actually.... the files that are output by swift are from my local /tmp directory (which I was under when running the swift delete * command)
so swift is looking for the local files from the location you are on when running the command.

look at this:

I have one container with 3 files:

[root@nott-vdsa /(keystone_admin)]# swift list
files
[root@nott-vdsa /(keystone_admin)]# swift list files
file1
file2
file3

I am under this location on my compute:

[root@nott-vdsa dafna_test(keystone_admin)]# pwd
/tmp/dafna_test

where I created these 3 files:

[root@nott-vdsa dafna_test(keystone_admin)]# ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Sep 27 16:23 local_file
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Sep 27 16:23 local_file1
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Sep 27 16:23 local_file2

I run swift delete *

[root@nott-vdsa dafna_test(keystone_admin)]# swift delete *
Object 'local_file/local_file2' not found
Object 'local_file/local_file1' not found
[root@nott-vdsa dafna_test(keystone_admin)]# ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Sep 27 16:23 local_file
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Sep 27 16:23 local_file1
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Sep 27 16:23 local_file2

now I'll do the same from a different location:

[root@nott-vdsa logs(keystone_admin)]# pwd
/tmp/logs

I copies some logs there so ls output is:

[root@nott-vdsa logs(keystone_admin)]# ls -l
total 140
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 138625 Sep 27 16:26 access_log
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 3797 Sep 27 16:26 error_log
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Sep 27 16:26 swift-startup.log

[root@nott-vdsa logs(keystone_admin)]# swift delete *
Object 'access_log/error_log' not found
Object 'access_log/swift-startup.log' not found
[root@nott-vdsa logs(keystone_admin)]#

as you can see, what swift is looking for are actually the files from the local dir in which I am located on while running the command.

and the container is not deleted at all:

[root@nott-vdsa logs(keystone_admin)]# swift list files
file1
file2
file3

[Chmouel Boudjnah (chmouel)]

I am not sure I understand, what do you expect when doing swift delete * ?
Are you expecting that swift will delete every containers in your account?
It will not because when you do that from a shell the shell would do an expansion and there is no way to avoid that except if you add a backslash or quote it which then get * properly passed into the argv of the swiftclient.

Swift does not know anything about */star (you may even as well have a object called * if you wanted), if you really want to delete everything on your swift you just can do swift delete --all

[Dafna Ron (dron-3)]

I'll explain what my expectations are then :)

I expect that swift will either delete all containers when using a wild card or exit like it would if I run
swift upload *
what I don't expect is swift to list the files from my local dir and try to delete them from swift servers and than give errors that they do not exist.

I also do not expect inconsistency in the way that swift handles the */star.
for example, swift knows to upload all the files from a directory and create a container when I used 'swift upload * local_file'
[root@nott-vdsa tmp(keystone_admin)]# swift list local_file
local_file
local_file1
local_file2

swift will try to upload and create containers for all files/directories under my location if I use * with upload as well.
but it will not know how to delete all the files from the container or delete all containers if I use *

btw, you can create a container called * but you do have to use '*' as we have to do for all special characters and you need to use the same syntax when deleting it.

as you can see, I created one using swift post '*'

[root@nott-vdsa tmp(keystone_admin)]# swift list
*

swift delete * will not delete anything because it will try to find all the files from my local /tmp dir:

[root@nott-vdsa tmp(keystone_admin)]# swift delete *
Object 'create_horizon.txt/keystone-signing-hf66GT' not found
Object 'create_horizon.txt/file1' not found
Object 'create_horizon.txt/keystone-signing-lx4Ig6' not found
Object 'create_horizon.txt/keystone-signing-mBgRBf' not found
Object 'create_horizon.

swift delete '*' will delete it though...

[root@nott-vdsa tmp(keystone_admin)]# swift delete '*'
[root@nott-vdsa tmp(keystone_admin)]# swift list
local_file
test
test1

for conclusion, I think that you can decide on any design that you like, but I think that currently there is inconsistency in the way that we use * in swift.

and I have to add one last thing... I do the testing from a user/admin prospective (which is our end user right?) and yes, I have read the help file and noticed the --all, but using a * in linux is a standard, so when I run swift delete * I do expect all containers to be deleted or for a graceful exit to happen :)