Bash – Delete .pdf files only if .xlsx files in directory have same filename

bashdirectoryfilesrmshell

I have folders with hundreds of pdf and xls(x) files that were mass exported from legal e-discovery systems. The filenames in these exports correspond to bates # such as ABCD_00000001.pdf, ABCD_00000002.pdf, … , ABCD_00002000.pdf. These mass exports include a blank pdf file for every single xls(x) file – with both having the exact same filename. E.g., ABCD_00000005.xlsx is the xlsx file that was produced in the ediscovery system and ABCD_00000005.pdf is an extraneous blank pdf file that was created in the mass export.

These extraneous .pdf files probably result from a user error on the part of the people running these mass exports, but I don't usually have control over that side of the process. So I wanted to know if any relatively straightforward way to delete these extraneous .pdf without forcing someone to go through them manually.

Best Answer

Loop over the pdf files, use parameter expansion to extract the basename:

#!/bin/bash
for pdf in *.pdf ; do
    basename=${pdf%.pdf}
    if [[ -f $basename.xls || -f $basename.xlsx ]] ; then
        rm "$pdf"
    fi
done

Update: I got the logic backwards, should be fixed now.

Related Solutions

Bash – Manipulate file name piped from find command

As other answers have already identified, ${f%.*} is expanded by the shell before it runs the xargs command. You need this expansion to happen once for each file name, with the shell variable f set to the file name (passing -I f doesn't do that: xargs has no notion of shell variable, it looks for the string f in the command, so if you'd used e.g. xargs -I e echo … it would have executed commands like ./somedir/somefile.wmacho .mp3).

Keeping on this approach, tell xargs to invoke a shell that can perform the expansion. Better, tell find — xargs is a largely obsolete tool and is hard to use correctly, as modern versions of find have a construct that does the same job (and more) with fewer plumbing difficulties. Instead of find … -print0 | xargs -0 command …, run find … -exec command … {} +.

find . -name '*.wma' -type f -exec sh -c 'for f; do echo "${f%.*}.mp3"; done' _ {} +

The argument _ is $0 in the shell; the file names are passed as the positional arguments which for f; do … loops over. A simpler version of this command executes a separate shell for each file, which is equivalent but slightly slower:

find . -name '*.wma' -type f -exec sh -c 'echo "${0%.*}.mp3"' {} \;

You don't actually need to use find here, assuming you're running a reasonably recent shell (ksh93, bash ≥4.0, or zsh). In bash, put shopt -s globstar in your .bashrc to activate the **/ glob pattern to recurse in subdirectories (in ksh, that's set -o globstar). Then you can run

for f in **/*.wma; do
  echo "${f%.*}.mp3"
done

(If you have directories called *.wma, add [ -f "$f" ] || continue at the beginning of the loop.)

Bash – the most efficient way to move a large number of files that reside in a single directory

Taking advantage of GNU mv's -t option to specify the target directory, instead of relying on the last argument:

find . -name "*" -maxdepth 1 -exec mv -t /home/foo2/bulk2 {} +

If you were on a system without the option, you could use an intermediate shell to get the arguments in the right order (find … -exec … + doesn't support putting extra arguments after the list of files).

find . -name "*" -maxdepth 1 -exec sh -c 'mv "$@" "$0"' /home/foo2/bulk2 {} +

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Manipulate file name piped from find command

Bash – the most efficient way to move a large number of files that reside in a single directory

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