Delete files with string found in file - linux cli

Question

I am trying to delete erroneous emails based on finding the email address in the file via Linux CLI.

I can get the files with

find . | xargs grep -l [email protected]

But I cannot figure out how to delete them from there as the following code doesn't work.

rm -f | xargs find . | xargs grep -l [email protected]

Thank you for your assistance.

Answer 1

For safety I normally pipe the output from find to something like awk and create a batch file with each line being "rm filename"

That way you can check it before actually running it and manually fix any odd edge cases that are difficult to do with a regex

find . | xargs grep -l [email protected] | awk '{print "rm "$1}' > doit.sh vi doit.sh // check for murphy and his law source doit.sh 

Answer 2

@Martin Beckett posted an excellent answer, please follow that guideline

solution for your command :

grep -l [email protected] * | xargs rm 

Or

for file in $(grep -l [email protected] *); do     rm -i $file;     #  ^ prompt for delete done