[skeates]

Hi all

Very simple question. I need to delete a load of files in different locations. I have a txt file with all the file locations in it.

Is there any way I can pipe it into rm to so that I do not have to delete them individually. There are about 300 or so files so I really need to be able to pull the info from the txt file.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[mduell]

xargs will help you there, something like: cat file_locations.txt | xargs rm -f

You may want to do something like "cat file_locations.txt | xargs echo" first to make sure the paths in the text file are being parsed as expected (whitespace vs null termination, etc).

[Hal Itosis]

A little trick which helps xargs do the right thing is
to convert newlines to null chars and use the -0 flag:

cat filepaths.txt |tr '\n' '\000' |xargs -0 ls -d

An alternative way (slower perhaps) is the while/read construct:

cat filepaths.txt |while IFS= read -r x; do ls -d "$x"; done

The paths in the text file need to be absolute (full) pathnames,
else you'd need to cd into the same relative parent folder first.

[CharlesS]

The standard disclaimer is that piping a text file to rm is extremely dangerous, and if there's one little error in your file somewhere, you could end up deleting a lot more than you intended to.

What I myself would do instead would be to make a temporary folder somewhere, and then use xargs -J % mv % /path/to/temporary/folder/ instead of xargs rm -f. That way, it will simply move the files to the folder, and you can then inspect the contents of the folder to make sure it contains only the stuff you want to delete before trashing the folder.