17
12
I want to delete all files that contain the string foo
. How can I do this using bash in Linux?
17
12
I want to delete all files that contain the string foo
. How can I do this using bash in Linux?
33
Here is a safe way:
grep -lrIZ foo . | xargs -0 rm -f --
-l
prints file names of files matching the search pattern.-r
performs a recursive search for the pattern foo
in the given directory .
.
If this doesn't work, try -R
.-I
(capital i
) causes binary files like PDFs to be skipped.-Z
ensures that file names are zero- (i.e., nul-)terminated so that a name containing white space does not get interpreted in the wrong way
(i.e., as multiple names instead of one).xargs -0
feeds the file names from grep
to rm -f
, separating words by zero (nul) bytes (remember the -Z
option from grep
).--
is often forgotten but it is very important to mark the end of options and allow for removal of files whose names begin with -
.If you would like to see which files are about to be deleted, simply remove the | xargs -0 rm -f --
part, and leave off the Z
option to grep
.
Another user suggested something like the following, which you should not run because it is unsafe:
files=`grep foo * | cut -d: -f1`
rm -f $files # unsafe, do not run it!
If I have files ImportantStuff
that I do not want to delete and obsolete ImportantStuff
containing foo
, then I lose ImportantStuff
(and not obsolete ImportantStuff
!) when I run this command, because $files
gets broken apart at spaces when it is interpreted. It is dangerous to put a list of filenames into a scalar shell variable in this way.
17
$ find -type f -exec grep -q "foo" {} \; -exec echo rm -- {} \;
This recursively searches for files containing foo
. The second -exec
is only run if the first exec
exits successfully, i.e. if grep
matches. Dryrun and remove the echo
if the output seems correct.
Or alternatively
$ find -type f -exec grep -q "foo" {} \; -print
and
$ find -type f -exec grep -q "foo" {} \; -delete
as suggested by Lekensteyn.
4... which can be shortened to: find -type f -exec grep -q 'foo' {} \; -delete
(the quotes around {}
are redundant, find
is also able to delete files.). Note that grep
accepts a regular expression. If you want to search for foo.bar
, either escape this or pass the -F
option to treat the pattern as literal. – Lekensteyn – 2013-04-20T17:06:37.490
any reason to use -exec echo rm "{}" \;
and not -delete
? – vartec – 2013-04-20T20:47:53.330
1@vartec No, I'd use -delete
. It's just easier to demonstrate with the second -exec
and echo in place. – Adrian Frühwirth – 2013-04-20T20:53:12.833
1It is easier to type -print
(or -ls
for more verbosity) than -exec echo rm "{}" \'
. No need for external utilities. – Lekensteyn – 2013-04-20T21:07:09.990
1if you use rm {}, use rm -- {}, so that any special characters in the file name itself don't get interpolated. For example, touch '-rf /' in any directory where you have write permissions... – atk – 2013-04-21T00:15:43.073
1
I'd do what Adrian says,
But I'd add word boundries arond the foo so as to not accidentaly delete files containing "food" (unless it is deleting everything containing food is what you want.)
$ find -type f -exec grep -q "\<foo\>" {} \; -delete
acutally, I'd redirect the output before deleteing so I could review before deleting:
$ find -type f -exec grep -q "\<foo\>" > /tmp/list_of_files_to_delete
As soon as you are able to post comments, you should post things like that as comments. – FSMaxB – 2013-04-21T08:05:45.927
yes I tried first but then realised that I'm not allowed to post comments yet . – Petter H – 2013-04-21T14:29:34.570
that string is its file name ? – rɑːdʒɑ – 2013-04-20T15:53:57.277
3Please clarify: do you want to delete files whose name contains
foo
(e.g.myfoo.jpg
), or files that contain the byte sequencefoo
(which may include binary files which just so happen to contain that sequence of bytes)? – hammar – 2013-04-20T21:32:18.093