Shell Scripting – How to Delete Files with Spaces in Their Names

quotingrmshellxargs

I am trying to delete all the files with a space in their names. I am using following command. But it is giving me an error

Command : ls | egrep '. ' | xargs rm

Here if I am using only ls | egrep '. ' command it is giving me all the file name with spaces in the filenames. But when I am trying to pass the output to rm, all the spaces (leading or trailing) gets deleted. So my command is not getting properly executed.

Any pointers on how to delete the file having atleast one space in their name?

Best Answer

You can use standard globbing on the rm command:

rm -- *\ *

This will delete any file whose name contains a space; the space is escaped so the shell doesn't interpret it as a separator. Adding -- will avoid problems with filenames starting with dashes (they won’t be interpreted as arguments by rm).

If you want to confirm each file before it’s deleted, add the -i option:

rm -i -- *\ *

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But the following command doesn't work in the way I hope.

locate -i nohup.out | xargs -0 -n 1 -p rm -i

Of course if you are using xargs -0 then you must match that with locate -0.

It doesn't prompt each file to be removed and ask for my permission. I wonder why

xargs should read input from /dev/tty when prompting you. It works that way so that there is no conflict between the use of xargs's stdin for reading arguments from locate and reading responses for the -p option.

However, you are using xargs to run rm -i. The rm -i command also wants to read your input, which it will read from stdin. Hence it eats up part of xargs's input and things don't work how you expect.

and what command works as I hope?

If you are using Bash, this is one option:

xargs -a <(locate -0 -i nohup.out) -0 -n 1 -p rm -i

However, you can also do everything in find:

find / -depth -name nohup.out -ok rm -i '{}' ';'

Change ';' to '+' to delete more than one file at a time. This requirement and the various ways you can solve this problem are explained in the Texinfo manual for findutils.

Bash – How to decode a list of base64-encoded file names

Just add the base64 encoding of newline (Cg==) after each file name and pipe the whole thing to base64 -d:

find . -name "*_*" -printf "%f\n" |
  sed -n 's/_....-..-..\.pdf$/Cg==/p' |
  base64 -d

With your approach, that would have to be something like:

find . -name "*_*" -printf "%f\0" |
  sed -zn 's/_....-..-..\.pdf$//p' |
  xargs -r0 sh -c '
    for i do
      echo "$i" | base64 -d
    done' sh

as you need a shell to create those pipelines. But that would mean running several commands per file which would be quite inefficient.

Best Answer

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Bash – How to decode a list of base64-encoded file names

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