Does the file contain file names or file extensions?

The best method will depend on the format of the file, the sanity of the filenames, etc.

The best way might be to move the files to another directory, then use whatever archiving method you like on that directory.

This code will retain the directory structure in the archive directory, so that multiple files of the same name can be accommodated:

archivedir=$HOME/arc
[ -d "$archivedir" ] || mkdir -p "$archivedir" || exit 1
while IFS= read -r file
do
  find . -name "$file" |
    while IFS= read -r f
    do
      dir=$archivedir/${f%/*}
      [ -d "$dir" ] || mkdir -p "$archivedir" || continue
      mv "$f" "$dir"
    done
done < FILE_WITH_LIST

Quote:

Originally Posted by axel1973 i found this solutions in some forum lately... it reads a list of files (with or without pathnames) from a file and removes/deletes them using rm. Code: xargs rm -rf </lists/blah.txt this solutions seems to have a problem if using with files that contains SPACES and stuff..

Set IFS to a newline first, then it will work.

 cat filename.txt | while read file; do rm "$file"; done

There is no need for cat:

Code:

while read file; do rm "$file"; done < filename.txt