Command Line Help: Remove a List of Files

lukasbradley · 08-16-2005, 08:44 PM

I'm trying to remove a series of PDF files that reside in many subdirectories. The following commands don't work:

Code:

rm -f | find . -name *.pdf 

rm -f < find . -name *.pdf 

find . -name *.pdf > pdf.files.txt 
rm -f < cat pdf.files.txt 

find . -name *.pdf -exec "rm -f {}"

I'm going crazy. Someone please help.

alienDog · 08-16-2005, 08:52 PM

find -name *.pdf -exec rm -f {} \;

jonaskoelker · 08-17-2005, 04:21 AM

Code:

$ find -name *.pdf | xargs rm -f
$ rm -f $(find -name *.pdf)
$ for i in $(find -name *.pdf); do rm -f $i; done

You may want to try and cat the files instead of rm'ing them, just in case--spaces and other weird characters in the filenames may not be handled gracefully by my examples (they should be irrelevant in alienDog's code); try setting IFS to '\n'.

Try playing around with the various mechanisms and programs I mentioned; rtm and backup vital data before doing anything stupid

hth --Jonas