UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi. I need to delete a large number of files listed in a txt file. There are over 90000 files in the list. Some of the directory names and some of the file names do have spaces in them.

In the file, each line is a full path to a file:
/path/to/the files/file1
/path/to/some other/files/file 2

I have a couple questions.

1. To remedy the spaces in the directory and file names I added " to the beginning and end of each line.
The file now looks like this:
"/path/to/the files/file1"
"/path/to/some other/files/file 2"

Would this solve the problem of the spaces in the file and directory names? Would single quotes be preferable?

2.

Code:

xargs rm -f < listoffiles.txt

xargs is a command I am familiar with. Would the number of files (90000+) cause an issue using xargs?

If so, would a do loop of kind overcome that? I saw the code below posted on another thread here. Could this be executed from the shell directly or would it need to be wrapped in a script?

Code:

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

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

xargs -d '\n' rm -f < hugelistofiles ought to tell it to split on newlines alone without resorting to editing the input file.

Huge numbers of arguments shouldn't be a problem for xargs, that being what it was made for. It understands the maximum argument size and will split across multiple rm -f calls accordingly.

---------- Post updated at 04:56 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:53 PM ----------

Your while loop would work, but wouldn't be nearly as efficient as xargs.

Code:

xargs -d '\n' rm -f < hugelistofiles

Thank you. I am doing this on an AIX box. I have seen the above command used on Linux. Would it also work on AIX?

I believe -d is a portable argument. If in doubt, consult 'man xargs' for your system. And of course it's just good sense to do a dry-run on any command that would delete things:

Code:

# Check if the number of lines in the file matches the number of lines printed by xargs
wc filename
# should run echo EXACTLY once per file because of -n 1, which should be EXACTLY
# once per line if splitting isn't happening on spaces because of -d '\n'
xargs -d '\n' -n 1 echo rm -f < hugelistofiles | wc

If the count of lines matches, then it's not splitting on spaces.

Just try it out on the command line. It takes less than 5 seconds to execute it than posting and waiting to get an answer. Put an "echo" in front of the rm command to see if your files are properly interpreted

Code:

$> while read -r file; do echo rm -f "$file"; done < listoffiles.txt

this is the most straightforward way doing it using the shell without any external tools