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 delet

Answer 1

xargs -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.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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 {} \; > findresult.txt
grep ": ASCII text$" findresult.txt > textfiles.txt
# leave only the path to the file removing suffix and prefix
sed -i -e 's/:.*$//' 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

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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