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 `cat 1.txt` 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 <1.txt Manual rm call removes files from such folders, so no issue with permissions.
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 < 1.txt
filename='123.txt'; while read line ; rm -r "$line"; done < $filename. Pay attention to the quote marks around $line. It is a gotcha point in shell scripting.
xargs rmAssuming that the list of files is in the file 1.txt, then do:
xargs rm -r <1.txt
The -r option causes recursion into any directories named in 1.txt.
If any files are read-only, use the -f option to force the deletion:
xargs rm -rf <1.txt
Be cautious with input to any tool that does programmatic deletions. Make certain that the files named in the input file are really to be deleted. Be especially careful about seemingly simple typos. For example, if you enter a space between a file and its suffix, it will appear to be two separate file names:
file .txt
is actually two separate files: file and .txt.
This may seem not so dangerous, but if the typo is something like this:
myoldfiles *
Then instead of deleting all files that begin with myoldfiles, you'll end up deleting myoldfiles and all non-dot-files and directories in the current directory. Probably not what you wanted.
Use this:
while IFS= read -r file ; do rm -- "$file" ; done < delete.list
If you need glob expansion you can omit quoting $file:
IFS=""
while read -r file ; do rm -- $file ; done < 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.
/My Dir With Spaces/ /Spaces and globs/*.txt, --file-with-leading-dashes, and as a bonus it's POSIX and works on GNU/Linux, macOS and BSD.You could use '\n' for define the new line character as delimiter.
xargs -d '\n' rm < 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 < 1.txt
xargs: illegal option -- d-0 on OS X.xargs -I_ rm _ also works in OS X :) see stackoverflow.com/a/39335402/266309xargs -d '\n' ls < 1.txt or xargs -d '\n' stat < 1.txt to verify what will be deleted and avoid nasty surprisesxargs -I{} sh -c 'rm "{}"' < 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.
xargs -I{} sh -c 'rm {}' < 1.txt
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.
-n <n> argument to xargs to reduce the number of arguments passed to each rm, but that will still not protect you from a single glob which exceeds the limit.rm invocation per line in the source file?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 )
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.
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
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
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
In case somebody prefers sed and removing without wildcard expansion:
sed -e "s/^\(.*\)$/rm -f -- \'\1\'/" 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 "rm -f -- '\''%s'\''\n",$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.
