from the desk of stinkpot

pipe filenames to rm in unix

February 1st, 2007 by Lawrence David

say you’ve got a stream of filenames that you’d like to remove.  for instance, i’ve got a bunch of filenames that pop out of this command:

grep -v “,” `search “boot0.txt”` | sed ‘s/boot.*//’

turns out i can’t directly pipe this to rm.  instead, i’ve got to use the xargs command, as so:

grep -v “,” `search “boot0.txt”` | sed ‘s/boot.*//’ | xargs rm -r

Posted in Shell Scripting | 11 Comments »

if that was helpful ...

check out the other tips and tricks i've compiled on these pages. you might learn something else interesting!

11 Responses to “pipe filenames to rm in unix”

1. on 04 Mar 2009 at 3:54 pm   Anton Thorn

   Priceless! Thank you!

2. on 21 Jun 2009 at 11:37 am   Donald Kail

   Awesome!

3. on 16 Sep 2009 at 5:28 pm   danips

   Thanks it worked
   BTW nice blog header ^_^

4. on 21 Nov 2009 at 10:59 am   ikenna

   thanks mate!

5. on 05 Feb 2010 at 10:37 pm   Anonymous

   great command

6. on 01 Feb 2011 at 4:15 pm   Elia

   very nice menu!!!!

7. on 23 Aug 2011 at 5:17 pm   Me

   Worked great!!!

8. on 02 Nov 2011 at 2:12 pm   Ã…smund Stavdahl

   Awesome tip and even more awesome header

9. on 24 Aug 2012 at 5:03 am   JFred

   so much time has passed with this awfull “while read line;do rm $line;done < <(ls things)"… *sigh*
   Many thanks !!

10. on 15 Oct 2012 at 7:23 am   RockFord

    have you ever tried vipe?

    ex.:
    git status -u | vipe | xargs -Rf

    

11. on 06 Feb 2014 at 7:53 pm   Doc

    Thanks man. xargs eh? Cool.