Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all,

I need a script to delete a large set of files from a directory under / based on an input file and want to redirect errors into separate file.

I have already prepared a list of files in the input file.

Kndly help me.

Thanks,
Prash

Code:

xargs echo rm < list 2> errlog

Remove the 'echo' once you've tested and are sure it really does what you want.

I have run the below command but i need to print to a file where it shows what files have been deleted?

sudo xargs rm <file

Btw all the files are in directory under "/" . But the input file is something like below (i.e) it dont have any path to the file. So i need a command which deletes these files without storing the input file inside the directory under / where the original files reside.

more file
0012301170
0000013300
0000014100
-
-
-

Thanks for the quick reply.

---------- Post updated at 02:18 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:13 PM ----------

Corona,

Can you please suggest whether i can use the below script to delete the files?

Code:

for i in `cat file`;
do
     rm -f $i
done

If yes i want an echo statement to be printed on what files have been deleted and what file are not found in the directory?

P.S: I need to delete close to 100K files and the file anmes are listed in the input file.

Thanks

---------- Post updated at 04:10 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:18 PM ----------

Could you please help me in deleting the large set of files without moving the input file to a directory where original files reside.

Thanks

If your rm has the -v (verbose) option you could do this, assumption is your file_list.txt and logs are in the /tmp directory.

Code:

cd /your_dir
xargs rm -v < /tmp/file_list.txt > /tmp/removed.list 2> /tmp/errors.list

for i in `cat file`; This will be especially bad for what you want because it will try -- and fail -- to cram all 100,000 filenames into one thing and die with 'too many arguments'.

Thanks for the post. so if use the below script it is giving me illegal option --v errors, so i have taken -v option and have run the command it worked fine. But is there a way to capture all the files which were deleted in this operation?

I can see the data for which files were not found from errors.list

sudo xargs rm -v < /tmp/file > /tmp/removed.list 2> tmp/errors.list

Thanks

Well any file in the original filelist that isn't in the error list was removed.

Can you output the first few lines of the error file ( head /tmp/errors.list ) file so we can see the format, a simple awk script should be able to produce the removed files list.