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What's the fast way to delete these files?

 
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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers What's the fast way to delete these files?
# 1  
Old 12-30-2007
What's the fast way to delete these files?
Hi,

I had this request from user which I completed by using rm for all these files but I am wondering if there was way to finish it faster rather going through one file at a time.


Please check attached text file to see file names. Thanks!
filestoremove.txt (29.4 KB) 
# 2  
Old 12-30-2007
why do you have rm in front of all those file names? are they your actual file names?
# 3  
Old 12-30-2007
use regular expressions
first, to make sure, check with

ls -l aaaaa2007* llff2007*

to see that these are the ones you want to remove, then

rm aaaaa2007* llff2007*

good luck, and success !
# 4  
Old 12-30-2007
In terms of efficiency, using one rm per file is not efficient, as it requires a
fork and exec for each rm.

In a gneric situation if you try to remove all the files in one batch the number of arguments could be too big for the command.

Assuming you have a file with a list of files to remove in a file called list.txt something like this would be more efficient:
Code:
xargs -i rm {} < list

# 5  
Old 01-01-2008
ghostdog,

I used rm to remove those files so thats why I have it in there. I forgot to remove it when I posted that file here. Sorry for the confusion. Thanks!


botao,

Thanks! I will try that next time I get request like this instead of using rm with one file at a time.


reborg,

Could you please elaborate on your command line? As I understood from post that I can simply get all the files names in one file with txt extension and then execute the following?

xargs -i rm {} < list

Thanks! for the help everyone. I really appreciate your help.
 
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