Piping find results into another command

Question

I'm trying to scan a file system for files matching specific keywords, and then remove them. I have this so far:

find . -iregex '.*.new.*' -regex '.*.pdf*'

How do I then pipe the result for this command into a remove command (such as rm)

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/167823/find-exec-rm-vs-delete — Stephen Rauch, Jun 22 '17 at 00:23
You don't need a pipe, you need the -exec or -delete primaries of find. Also see Why is looping over find's output bad practice? — Wildcard, Jun 22 '17 at 02:32
@Wildcard , Thankyou, I realised that find had a -delete primary when I was reading through the man find command. — uhhhhhhhhhh_, Jun 23 '17 at 00:11

score 15 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 24 '22 at 12:44

One way is to expand the list of files and give it to rm as arguments:

$ rm $(find . -iregex '.*.new.*' -regex '.*.pdf*')

**That will fail with file names that have spaces or new lines.

You may use xargs to build the rm command, like this:

$ find . … … | xargs rm

** Will also fail on newlines or spaces

Or better, ask find to execute the command rm:

$ find . … … -exec rm {} \;

But the best solution is to use the delete option directly in find:

$ find . -iregex '.*.new.*' -regex '.*.pdf*' -delete

1 Answers1