[SOLVED] using locate with rm

nass · 03-02-2011, 10:02 AM

Hello everyone,
does anyone know how can I use locate with rm?

rm `locate "some file"`

does not work when my pathnames occasionally contain:
-spaces and other characters (like + or possibly others that need escaping)
-greek characters

how can I grab line-by-line the output from locate and wrap quotes"" around the paths??

Thank you for your help

jschiwal · 03-02-2011, 10:07 AM

locate "some file" | sed 's/.*/"&"/' | xargs rm

Locate will also return files where "some file" is a part of the filename. Be carefull. Try it without the xargs command first.

locate usually is configured for system files, not files under /home. The find command may be better to use.
example:
find music/ -iname "some file" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

nass · 03-02-2011, 11:07 AM

i'm on a preconfigured system running busybox .. and find is not the standard find, not all options are enabled unfortunately.
it's also pain to search through 3.6TB of data with find ...

you are correct about being extra careful when deleting with locate and find. I did check the output of locate thoroughly before piping to xargs rm..

your command works wonderfully. truth is I should have thought about it but i'm not very keen on the use of sed yet.

Thank you

Reuti · 03-02-2011, 11:25 AM

Just to note, that the locate database is usually rebuild each night by a cron-job. Hence the output you get might not reflect necessarily the actual list of files.

nass · 03-02-2011, 11:27 AM

i'm aware..
and have altered it to update the index every few hours.

at any rate for up to date info I run 'updatedb' directly

syg00 · 03-02-2011, 11:27 AM

check the locate manpage for passing it regex - you can be *very* specific if you wish.