Shell Programming and Scripting

corona688 has the right idea by getting "find" to expand the list, not shell.

This alternative method allows you to test the script without deleting anything (like corona688 version), works for any number of file in the directory, and works for filenames containing space characters:
The "." in the filename is escaped as "\." to make the point that this is not MSDOS and "." can be part of a regular expression.

We don't know if you have subdirectories containing files you don't want to delete. Otherwise generate the files list more efficiently with:

Code:

find . -type f -name \*\.txt -print

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
ls -1 *\.txt | while read filename
do
      echo "Deleting: ${filename}"
      # Uncomment next line if you are happy
      # rm "${filename}"
done

try the following:

Code:

find . -name '*.txt' | xargs rm

like this xargs will take care of splitting up the list of files into acceptable chunks. it will execute much faster than running rm for every single file found (what will happen when using the -exec option) without worrying about the number of files passed onto rm.

Code:

find -maxdepth 1 -name '*.txt' | xargs rm

didnt wrked

which command isn't working?

Leppie version is good. It will execute "rm" for each file like all sensible solutions. I can't see a way of testing it without deleting files.

In a modern unix, frequently executed programs are cached in memory and don't give the performance issues of 1980's unix. Similarly issuing a continuous stream of "exec" calls no longer crashes the kernel.

There are many methods to process large numbers of files, but to my mind the most important aspect is to be able to test what will happen in advance.

There is much variation in the "find" command depending on your version and vintage of unix or Linux. It always helps to state yout Operating System and preferred shell.

For example the "-maxdepth" parameter to "find" is not found in many unixes.

find /path/to/dir/ -iname '*.pdf' -exec echo rm '{}' ';'

This worked!!