Delete a list of files with find and grep

Question

I want to delete all files which have names containing a specific word, e.g. \"car\". So far, I came up with this:

find|grep car

How do I pass

Answer 1

I like to use

rm -rf $(find . | grep car)

It does exactly what you ask, logically running rm -rf on the what grep car returns from the output of find . which is a list of every file and folder recursively.

Answer 2

A bit of necromancy, but you can also use find, grep, and xargs

find . -type f | grep -e "pattern1" -e "pattern2" | xargs rm -rf

^ Find will need some attention to make it work for your needs potentially, such as is a file, mindepth, maxdepth and any globbing.

Answer 3

You can use ls and grep to find your files and rm -rf to delete the files.

rm -rf $(ls | grep car)

But this is not a good idea to use this command if there is a chance of directories or files, you don't want to delete, having names with the character pattern you are specifying with grep.

Answer 4

find start_dir -iname \*car\* -exec rm -v {} \;

Answer 5

To view what you are going to delete first, since rm -fr is such a dangerous command:

find /path/to/file/ | grep car | xargs ls -lh

Then if the results are what you want, run the real command by removing the ls -lh, replacing it with rm -fr

find /path/to/file/ | grep car | xargs rm -fr

Answer 6

You really want to use find with -print0 and rm with --:

find [dir] [options] -print0 | grep --null-data [pattern] | xargs -0 rm --

A concrete example (removing all files below the current directory containing car in their filename):

find . -print0 | grep --null-data car | xargs -0 rm --

Why is this necessary:

• -print0, --null-data and -0 change the handling of the input/output from parsed as tokens separated by whitespace to parsed as tokens separated by the \0-character. This allows the handling of unusual filenames (see man find for details)
• rm -- makes sure to actually remove files starting with a - instead of treating them as parameters to rm. In case there is a file called -rf and do find . -print0 | grep --null-data r | xargs -0 rm, the file -rf will possibly not be removed, but alter the behaviour of rm on the other files.