Unix How to delete files listed in a file

Question

I have a long text file with list of file masks I want to delete  Example    tmp aaa jpg  var www1    var www qwerty php   I need delete them  Tried rm   x60 cat 1 txt  x60  and it says the list is too long   Found this command  but when I check folders from the list  some of them still have files xargs rm  lt 1 txt Manual rm call removes files from such folders  so no issue with permissions

User · Answer

You could use   n  for define the new line character as delimiter   xargs -d   n  rm  lt  1 txt   Be careful with the -rf because it can delete what you don t want to if the 1 txt contains paths with spaces  That s why the new line delimiter a bit safer   On BSD systems  you could use -0 option to use new line characters as delimiter like this   xargs -0 rm  lt  1 txt

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Here s another looping example  This one also contains an  if-statement  as an example of checking to see if the entry is a  file   or a  directory  for example    for f in   cat 1 txt   do if   -f  f    then rm  f  fi  done

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Assuming that the list of files is in the file 1 txt  then do   xargs rm -r  lt 1 txt   The -r option causes recursion into any directories named in 1 txt   If any files are read-only  use the -f option to force the deletion   xargs rm -rf  lt 1 txt     Be cautious with input to any tool that does programmatic deletions   Make certain that the files named in the input file are really to be deleted   Be especially careful about seemingly simple typos   For example  if you enter a space between a file and its suffix  it will appear to be two separate file names   file  txt   is actually two separate files  file and  txt   This may not seem so dangerous  but if the typo is something like this   myoldfiles     Then instead of deleting all files that begin with myoldfiles  you ll end up deleting myoldfiles and all non-dot-files and directories in the current directory  Probably not what you wanted

User · Answer

You can use this one-liner   cat 1 txt   xargs echo rm   sh   Which does shell expansion but executes rm the minimum number of times

User · Answer

xargs -I   sh -c  rm      lt  1 txt should do what you want   Be careful with this command as one incorrect entry in that file could cause a lot of trouble   This answer was edited after  tdavies pointed out that the original did not do shell expansion

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Just to provide an another way  you can also simply use the following command    cat to remove  tmp file1  tmp file2  tmp file3   rm    cat to remove

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Use this   while IFS  read -r file   do rm --   file    done  lt  delete list   If you need glob expansion you can omit quoting  file   IFS    while read -r file   do rm --  file   done  lt  delete list   But be warned that file names can contain  problematic  content and I would use the unquoted version  Imagine this pattern in the file                This would delete quite a lot from the current directory  I would encourage you to prepare the delete list in a way that glob patterns aren t required anymore  and then use quoting like in my first example

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In case somebody prefers sed and removing without wildcard expansion  sed -e  quot s          rm -f --    1    quot  deletelist txt    bin sh  Reminder  use absolute pathnames in the file or make sure you are in the right directory  And for completeness the same with awk  awk   printf  quot rm -f --      s     n quot   1   deletelist txt    bin sh  Wildcard expansion will work if the single quotes are remove  but this is dangerous in case the filename contains spaces  This would need to add quotes around the wildcards

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This is not very efficient  but will work if you need glob patterns  as in  var www      for f in   cat 1 txt    do    rm   f  done   If you don t have any patterns and are sure your paths in the file do not contain whitespaces or other weird things  you can use xargs like so   xargs rm  lt  1 txt

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This will allow file names to have spaces  reproducible example      Select files of interest  here  only text files for ex  find -type f -exec file        gt  findresult txt grep    ASCII text   findresult txt  gt  textfiles txt   leave only the path to the file removing suffix and prefix sed -i -e  s         textfiles txt sed -i -e  s         textfiles txt   write a script that deletes the files in textfiles txt IFS backup  IFS IFS   echo   n b   for f in   cat textfiles txt    do  rm   f    done IFS  IFS backup    save script as  some sh  and run  sh some sh

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cat 1 txt   xargs rm -f   bash Run the command will do the following for files only   cat 1 txt   xargs rm -rf   bash Run the command will do the following recursive behaviour

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Here you can use set of folders from deletelist txt while avoiding some patterns as well  foreach f  cat deletelist txt      rm -rf ls   egrep -v  needthisfile   cpp   h  end

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In this particular case  due to the dangers cited in other answers  I would   Edit in e g  Vim and   s  s    0 g  escaping all space characters with a backslash  Then   s   rm -rf    prepending the command  With -r you don t have to worry to have directories listed after the files contained therein  and with -f it won t complain due to missing files or duplicate entries  Run all the commands    source 1 txt

[linux] Unix: How to delete files listed in a file

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