ls | egrep | xargs rm

Question

I have a group of files I'd like to remove at once.

ls | egrep \^New

The output is as expected,

New 1
New 2
New 3

but continuing the pipe with

| xargs -L rm

attempts to remove the input as space-delimited:

rm: New: No such file or directory
rm: 1: No such file or directory

What am I missing?

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 17 '17 at 16:05

Don’t parse ls. This should do the trick:

rm New*

Your approach is failing because xargs splits arguments up on whitespace by default, so it runs rm on New, 1, New, 2 etc. You could work around that by splitting on newlines, but that won’t work with filenames containing newlines.

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 17 '17 at 16:22

1

Yes you're right, xargs is breaking up the file names at the spaces. If you're using GNU xargs you can have it use a newline as the delimiter with the -d option. Example:

ls | egrep \^New | xargs -d '\n' rm

edited Oct 17 '17 at 16:22

Satō Katsura

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answered Oct 17 '17 at 16:16

David Birks

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I don't think xargs has a -d option. – erythraios Oct 17 '17 at 16:42
@erythraios xargs -d is not POSIX. But the xargs provided by GNU Findutils, which is present in GNU/Linux systems, does support it. – Eliah Kagan Oct 17 '17 at 16:47
Either used rm New* or use find . -type f -name "New*" -print0 |xargs -0 -r rm .. both handle special char correctly (the later is recursive and it's very powerful) – Franklin Piat Oct 17 '17 at 18:26

ls | egrep | xargs rm

2 Answers2