Unix: How to delete files listed in a file

Question

I have a long text file with list of file masks I want to delete

Example:

/tmp/aaa.jpg /var/www1/* /var/www/qwerty.php 

I need delete them. Tried rm `cat 1.txt` and it says the list is too long.

Found this command, but when I check folders from the list, some of them still have files xargs rm <1.txt Manual rm call removes files from such folders, so no issue with permissions.

Answer 1

This is not very efficient, but will work if you need glob patterns (as in /var/www/*)

for f in $(cat 1.txt) ; do    rm "$f" done 

If you don't have any patterns and are sure your paths in the file do not contain whitespaces or other weird things, you can use xargs like so:

xargs rm < 1.txt 

Answer 2

Assuming that the list of files is in the file 1.txt, then do:

xargs rm -r <1.txt 

The -r option causes recursion into any directories named in 1.txt.

If any files are read-only, use the -f option to force the deletion:

xargs rm -rf <1.txt 

---

Be cautious with input to any tool that does programmatic deletions. Make certain that the files named in the input file are really to be deleted. Be especially careful about seemingly simple typos. For example, if you enter a space between a file and its suffix, it will appear to be two separate file names:

file .txt 

is actually two separate files: file and .txt.

This may not seem so dangerous, but if the typo is something like this:

myoldfiles * 

Then instead of deleting all files that begin with myoldfiles, you'll end up deleting myoldfiles and all non-dot-files and directories in the current directory. Probably not what you wanted.