Unix: How to delete files listed in a file

Solution 1:

This is not very efficient, but will work if you need glob patterns (as in /var/www/*)

for f in $(cat 1.txt) ; do 
  rm "$f"
done

If you don't have any patterns and are sure your paths in the file do not contain whitespaces or other weird things, you can use xargs like so:

xargs rm < 1.txt

Solution 2:

Assuming that the list of files is in the file 1.txt, then do:

xargs rm -r <1.txt

The -r option causes recursion into any directories named in 1.txt.

If any files are read-only, use the -f option to force the deletion:

xargs rm -rf <1.txt

Be cautious with input to any tool that does programmatic deletions. Make certain that the files named in the input file are really to be deleted. Be especially careful about seemingly simple typos. For example, if you enter a space between a file and its suffix, it will appear to be two separate file names:

file .txt

is actually two separate files: file and .txt.

This may not seem so dangerous, but if the typo is something like this:

myoldfiles *

Then instead of deleting all files that begin with myoldfiles, you'll end up deleting myoldfiles and all non-dot-files and directories in the current directory. Probably not what you wanted.

Solution 3:

Use this:

while IFS= read -r file ; do rm -- "$file" ; done < delete.list

If you need glob expansion you can omit quoting $file:

IFS=""
while read -r file ; do rm -- $file ; done < delete.list

But be warned that file names can contain "problematic" content and I would use the unquoted version. Imagine this pattern in the file

*
*/*
*/*/*

This would delete quite a lot from the current directory! I would encourage you to prepare the delete list in a way that glob patterns aren't required anymore, and then use quoting like in my first example.

Solution 4:

You could use '\n' for define the new line character as delimiter.

xargs -d '\n' rm < 1.txt

Be careful with the -rf because it can delete what you don't want to if the 1.txt contains paths with spaces. That's why the new line delimiter a bit safer.

On BSD systems, you could use -0 option to use new line characters as delimiter like this: