Rm -f files starting with a digit

I've accidentally redirected the output of a CSV file to my directory. How can I rm only the files that start with a number, and leave the files that start with a letter intact?

mymachine$ ls
71.24         README.md        30            4.29
8             filter.sh        42.81         5.58         
8.36          purchases.csv    1,208.8       100          
16.7          2.56             21.78         269.96

Best Answer

Something like this should do it:

$ rm [0-9]*

Remember you can always use echo with any globbing arguments prior to letting rm run with them.

$ echo [0-9]*
100 1,208.8 16.7 21.78 2.56 269.96 30 42.81 4.29 5.58 71.24 8 8.36

After running the rm command above:

$ ls
filter.sh  purchases.csv  README.md

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Shell – remove oldest files

If you want to loop over files, never use ls*. tl;dr There are lots of situations where you'd end up deleting the wrong file, or even all files.

That said, unfortunately this is a tricky thing to do right in Bash. There's a working answer over at ~~a duplicate question~~ my even older find_date_sorted which you can use with small modifications:

counter=0
while IFS= read -r -d '' -u 9
do
    let ++counter
    if [[ counter -gt 3 ]]
    then
        path="${REPLY#* }" # Remove the modification time
        echo -e "$path" # Test
        # rm -v -- "$path" # Uncomment when you're sure it works
    fi
done 9< <(find . -mindepth 1 -type f -printf '%TY-%Tm-%TdT%TH:%TM:%TS %p\0' | sort -rz) # Find and sort by date, newest first

* No offense guys - I also used ls before. But it really isn't safe.

Edit: New find_date_sorted with unit tests.

Best Answer

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Shell – remove oldest files

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