Zookeeper CLI - wildcard support

Question

Looks like zookeeper CLI (zkCli.sh) does not support wildcard - I have not looked at the zookeeper code to figure out whether it is not possible design wise or whether I am missing something silly here.

What is the best way then to recursively delete nodes starting with a string. I would want to do something like:

./zkCli.sh rmr abc*

to delete all nodes that begin with abc. Is there any simpler way out other than using Java/Python or similar clients? Or in other words, is this achievable through only ZK CLI?

Answer 1

No, the current zkCli.sh does not support wildcard removal (according to the implementation of DeleteCommand and DeleteAllCommand, which are classes used by zkCli.sh)

However, it is pretty straigh-forward to create a workaround, e.g. in Python with Kazoo. Checkout this gist, usage is: python zkDelAll.py /abc

Interestingly, * is a valid path character, so you can create a znode with with a path /abc*.

EDIT: The core implementation from the gist is the following:

from kazoo.client import KazooClient
zk = KazooClient(hosts='localhost:2181')
zk.start()
for child in zk.get_children('/'):
    if child.startswith('abc'):
        zk.delete('/' + child)
zk.stop()