Delete a list of files with find and grep

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

or pass the output of your pipeline to xargs:

find | grep car | xargs rm -f

Note that these are very blunt tools, and you are likely to remove files that you did not intend to remove. Also, no effort is made here to deal with files that contain characters such as whitespace (including newlines) or leading dashes. Be warned.

To view what you are going to delete first, since rm -fr is such a dangerous command:

find /path/to/file/ | grep car | xargs ls -lh

Then if the results are what you want, run the real command by removing the ls -lh, replacing it with rm -fr

find /path/to/file/ | grep car | xargs rm -fr

I like to use

rm -rf $(find . | grep car)

It does exactly what you ask, logically running rm -rf on the what grep car returns from the output of find . which is a list of every file and folder recursively.

You really want to use find with -print0 and rm with --:

find [dir] [options] -print0 | grep --null-data [pattern] | xargs -0 rm --

A concrete example (removing all files below the current directory containing car in their filename):

find . -print0 | grep --null-data car | xargs -0 rm --

Why is this necessary:

• -print0, --null-data and -0 change the handling of the input/output from parsed as tokens separated by whitespace to parsed as tokens separated by the \0-character. This allows the handling of unusual filenames (see man find for details)
• rm -- makes sure to actually remove files starting with a - instead of treating them as parameters to rm. In case there is a file called -rf and do find . -print0 | grep --null-data r | xargs -0 rm, the file -rf will possibly not be removed, but alter the behaviour of rm on the other files.

This finds a file with matching pattern (*.xml) and greps its contents for matching string (exclude="1") and deletes that file if a match is found.

find . -type f -name "*.xml" -exec grep exclude=\"1\" {} \; -exec rm {} \;