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theTuxRacer
Asked: 2010-12-22 03:04:08 +0800 CST

How to delete all files that are returned by locate

  • 772

At the moment his is what I do:

Step 1:

locate fooBar
/home/abc/fooBar
/home/abc/Music/fooBar

Step 2:

Manually perform a removal, by copy-pasting each line.

rm /home/abc/fooBar
rm /home/abc/Music/fooBar

How do I do this in one step? Something like

locate fooBar > rm

Thanks.

command-line pipe

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    As the other chaps have already mentioned, xargs is your friend. It's a really powerful tool and I'll try to explain it and provide a workaround for a common gotcha.

    What xargs does is take a line from the input, and append it to another command, executing that other command for every line in the input. So by typing locate foobar | xargs rm -f, the output of the locate command will be patched onto the end of the rm -f command, and executed for each line produced by locate foobar.

    The gotcha:

    But what if there are spaces in your line(s) returned by locate? That will break the rm -f command because the arguments passed to rm need to be files (unless you use the -r switch), and a file-path needs to be escaped or quoted if it contains spaces.

    xargs provides the -i switch, to substitute the input into the command that follows instead of just appending it. So I'd change the suggestion to 

    locate foobar | xargs -ixxx rm -f 'xxx'

    which will now only break if the filenames returned by locate contained apostrophes.

    I have to concur with qbi, that you should be careful about using rm -f ! Use the -p flag to xargs, or just run the locate foobar by itself before feeding it to xargs, or drop the -f from rm.

    locate foobar | xargs -p -ixxx rm -f 'xxx'
    • 16

  2. You maybe need some more options for use with xargs. Test it first with xargs -p. If it is OK, remove the -p option:

    locate foobar | xargs rm
    • 8

  3. To delete all the files that are returned by locate,issue the following command in your terminal

    locate foobar | xargs rm -f

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