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

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

on 04 Mar 2009 at 3:54 pm Anton Thorn

Priceless! Thank you!
on 21 Jun 2009 at 11:37 am Donald Kail

Awesome!
on 16 Sep 2009 at 5:28 pm danips

Thanks it worked
BTW nice blog header ^_^
on 21 Nov 2009 at 10:59 am ikenna

thanks mate!
on 05 Feb 2010 at 10:37 pm Anonymous

great command
on 01 Feb 2011 at 4:15 pm Elia

very nice menu!!!!
on 23 Aug 2011 at 5:17 pm Me

Worked great!!!
on 02 Nov 2011 at 2:12 pm Åsmund Stavdahl

Awesome tip and even more awesome header

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