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Remove all files previously extracted from a tar(.gz) file.

Terminal - Remove all files previously extracted from a tar(.gz) file.
tar -tf <file.tar.gz> | xargs rm -r
2009-07-06 22:23:11
User: prayer
Functions: rm tar xargs
30
Up
Down
Remove all files previously extracted from a tar(.gz) file.
Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 2 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
tar -tf <file.tar.gz> | parallel rm
2010-01-28 08:28:16
User: unixmonkey8046
Functions: tar
Tags: xargs tar parallel
-2
Up
Down
Remove all files previously extracted from a tar(.gz) file.

xargs deals badly with special characters (such as space, ' and "). To see the problem try this:

touch important_file

touch 'not important_file'

ls not* | xargs rm

Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ does not have this problem.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
for i in $(tar -tf <file.tar.gz>); do rm $i; done;
2009-07-06 19:57:23
User: din7
Functions: rm tar
-4
Up
Down
Remove all files previously extracted from a tar(.gz) file.

Remove annoying improperly packaged files that untar into the incorrect directory.

Example, When you untar and it extracts hundreds of files into the current directory.... bleh.

Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

None of these alternatives is perfect. If one of the tar's directories has other files (like /usr/share/man), the 'rm -r' from alternative 1 will end up erasing the whole directory. And alternative 2 just does not remove directories.

My take:

tar tf <file.tar.gz> | sort -r | while read file; do if [ -d "$file" ]; then rmdir "$file"; else rm -f "$file"; fi; done

--> This command will spit a few error messages if there are already files on some directories, etc., but it will work OK and safe and will erase files and directories in the right order (files first, respective directories afterwards).

Comment by Patola 135 weeks and 3 days ago

many times people use * to build their archives which cause me some time stamp way to do this ... why not interrogate the archive ... Usually *nix users behave and put stuff in a folder then tar it up ... but most of the time when I see * archive it's .zip file ... this this inspired me to come up with this one:

unzip -lt foo.zip | grep testing | awk '{print $2}' | xargs rm -r
Comment by copremesis 135 weeks and 2 days ago

use pipe | while read a; instead of xargs. it happened to me to have too many entry to finish the buffer using xargs

Comment by ioggstream 135 weeks and 2 days ago

Your point of view

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