Remove accidentally extracted files

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How to de-unzip, de-tar -xvf — de-unarchive in a messy folder?

This is a pretty annoying occurrence. Sometimes, I download an archive (tar.gz, tar.bz2, zip, rar, etc) and run tar xf [file] (or similar) in the file's directory. In rare occasions, all the files extract in the current working directory instead of a sub-directory. This can lead to hundreds of files and hundreds of patterns that can't simply be removed using a pattern matching solution.

Is there a way to get the file contents of an archive and then delete all files on that list in the current working directory?

I hate tar-bombs, so I always create a subdirectory, put the archive there and uncompress it. Just in case. An efective way is also to always redirect the verbose list of extracted files to a file, so you have a list of what to remove if this happens. — orion, Mar 19 '14 at 19:22

score 25 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 02 '23 at 12:29

25

You can list the content of the archive and then pass the list to rm using xargs

Example for a tarball (test it without the rm first):

tar tfz archive.tar.gz | xargs rm -rf

For .zip files, replace tar tfz archive.tar.gz with unzip -Z1 file.zip (or equivalently zipinfo -1 file.zip) (ref: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/128304/368910)

edited Jun 02 '23 at 12:29

sandshrew118

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answered Nov 20 '11 at 08:06

Matteo

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It's definitely the smartest way to do it. – Deniz Oct 09 '15 at 09:26
1

How could it be for a zip file? – Joshua Salazar Feb 02 '18 at 01:00
first output line is ., omit with | sed '1d' | xargs rm -rf – trthfgh Apr 23 '23 at 01:07

score -1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 14 '12 at 02:46

-1

Assuming all the files were extracted on the same date/time, you could write a one-liner and pass the regex to rm.

answered Feb 14 '12 at 02:46

fischz14

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Could you elaborate a bit, in particular to distinguish your response from the already accepted one? Would the one-liner use find based on the mtime? And where do regexes come into this at all? – Kevin Feb 14 '12 at 04:53

Remove accidentally extracted files

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