How to delete multiple files at once in Bash on Linux?
If you want to delete all files whose names match a particular form, a wildcard (glob pattern) is the most straightforward solution. Some examples:
$ rm -f abc.log.* # Remove them all
$ rm -f abc.log.2012* # Remove all logs from 2012
$ rm -f abc.log.2012-0[123]* # Remove all files from the first quarter of 2012
Regular expressions are more powerful than wildcards; you can feed the output of grep
to rm -f
. For example, if some of the file names start with "abc.log"
and some with "ABC.log"
, grep
lets you do a case-insensitive match:
$ rm -f $(ls | grep -i '^abc\.log\.')
This will cause problems if any of the file names contain funny characters, including spaces. Be careful.
When I do this, I run the ls | grep ...
command first and check that it produces the output I want -- especially if I'm using rm -f
:
$ ls | grep -i '^abc\.log\.'
(check that the list is correct)
$ rm -f $(!!)
where !!
expands to the previous command. Or I can type up-arrow or Ctrl-P and edit the previous line to add the rm -f
command.
This assumes you're using the bash shell. Some other shells, particularly csh and tcsh and some older sh-derived shells, may not support the $(...)
syntax. You can use the equivalent backtick syntax:
$ rm -f `ls | grep -i '^abc\.log\.'`
The $(...)
syntax is easier to read, and if you're really ambitious it can be nested.
Finally, if the subset of files you want to delete can't be easily expressed with a regular expression, a trick I often use is to list the files to a temporary text file, then edit it:
$ ls > list
$ vi list # Use your favorite text editor
I can then edit the list
file manually, leaving only the files I want to remove, and then:
$ rm -f $(<list)
or
$ rm -f `cat list`
(Again, this assumes none of the file names contain funny characters, particularly spaces.)
Or, when editing the list
file, I can add rm -f
to the beginning of each line and then:
$ . ./list
or
$ source ./list
Editing the file is also an opportunity to add quotes where necessary, for example changing rm -f foo bar
to rm -f 'foo bar'
.
Just use multiline selection in sublime to combine all of the files into a single line and add a space between each file name and then add rm
at the beginning of the list. This is mostly useful when there isn't a pattern in the filenames you want to delete.
[$]> rm abc.log.2012-03-14 abc.log.2012-03-27 abc.log.2012-03-28 abc.log.2012-03-29 abc.log.2012-03-30 abc.log.2012-04-02 abc.log.2012-04-04 abc.log.2012-04-05 abc.log.2012-04-09 abc.log.2012-04-10
Bash supports all sorts of wildcards and expansions.
Your exact case would be handled by brace expansion, like so:
$ rm -rf abc.log.2012-03-{14,27,28}
The above would expand to a single command with all three arguments, and be equivalent to typing:
$ rm -rf abc.log.2012-03-14 abc.log.2012-03-27 abc.log.2012-03-28
It's important to note that this expansion is done by the shell, before rm
is even loaded.
Use a wildcard (*
) to match multiple files.
For example, the command below will delete all files with names beginning with abc.log.2012-03-
.
rm -f abc.log.2012-03-*
I'd recommend running ls abc.log.2012-03-*
to list the files so that you can see what you are going to delete before running the rm
command.
For more details see the Bash man page on filename expansion.