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Delete all files found in directory A from directory B

Terminal - Delete all files found in directory A from directory B
for file in <directory A>/*; do rm <directory B>/`basename $file`; done
2009-05-04 12:44:50
User: jamiebullock
Functions: file rm
10
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Delete all files found in directory A from directory B

This command is useful if you accidentally untar or unzip an archive in a directory and you want to automatically remove the files. Just untar the files again in a subdirectory and then run the above command e.g.

for file in ~/Desktop/temp/*; do rm ~/Desktop/`basename $file`; done
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Alternatives

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Terminal - Alternatives

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What others think

cd ~/Desktop/temp find * -type f -exec rm ~/Desktop/temp/{} \;
Comment by SlimG 211 weeks and 3 days ago

@SlimG I think you meant the cd to be 'cd ~/Desktop' so in one line it would be:

find directoryA -type f -exec rm directoryB/{} \;

@jamiebullock many times you can replace a bash for loop that does a single action on some set of files with a single find command. Find lets you be very specific about the files you are searching for way beyond common shell "globbing" such as ls *.png, and then specify actions to be taken on each matching file, such as deletion, or running an arbitrary command with each match as the argument. See 'man find' for more.

Comment by bwoodacre 211 weeks and 3 days ago
tar tzf archive.tar.gz | xargs rm
Comment by log0 211 weeks and 3 days ago

@SlimG @bwoodacre Yes i'm also a big fan of find, but I periodically forget to use it! I agree it's cleaner than the for loop.

@log0 That's *very* nice

Comment by jamiebullock 211 weeks and 1 day ago

@log0 bet me to it but

ls dirA | xargs -I file rm dirB/file

Comment by Newky 49 weeks and 2 days ago

Your point of view

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