How to delete files on the command line with regular expressions?

Question

Lets say I have 20 files named FOOXX, where XX is the number of the file, eg 01, 02 etc.

At the moment, if I want to delete all files lower than the number 10, this is easy and I just use a wildcard, eg rm FOO0*

However, if I want to delete specific files ina range, eg 13-15, this becomes more difficult.

rm FPP[13-15] does not work, and asks me if I wish to delete all files. Likewse rm FOO1[3-5] wishes to delete all files that begin with FOO1

So, what is the best way to delete ranges of files like this?

I have tried with both bash and zsh, and I don't think they differ so much for such a basic task?

Solution 1

In bash you can use:

rm FOO1{3..5}

or

rm FOO1{3,4,5}

to delete FOO13, FOO14 and FOO15.

Bash expansions brace are documented here.

Solution 2

For future readers, the find command can also delete files. I settled on this for a similar problem:

find . -type f -regex '...' -delete

but the chosen answer is the simplest anser to this question.

Solution 3

ls | grep regex | xargs rm

Comments

[kmarsh]

@Ignacio yeah- I'd like to see the character set has that collation order!

[Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams]

Or even rm FOO{13..15}.

[Jack]

Is this also true for ZSH?

[Dennis Williamson]

You should use find -regex ... -print0 | xargs -0 ... for this, otherwise it fails for filenames with spaces.

[Dennis Williamson]

@Jack: Yes, it is.

[Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams]

Of course, if you're going to use find then you may as well just use -exec.

[Anake]

In my case the files had spaces, and changing the delimiter fixes the spaces issue: ls | grep regex | xargs --delimiter='\n' rm

[evilsoup]

-1 for attempting to parse ls

[abhinavkulkarni]

@Jack: bash commands form subset of z shell commands.

[Aditya M P]

So I need to learn both regex and globbing syntax. Boohoo. :)

[Iulian Onofrei]

@evilsoup, +1 for adding that warning, but, who inserts a new line in a file name?

[Iulian Onofrei]

@DennisWilliamson, Shouldn't it be find . -regex ... -print0 | xargs -0 ... instead?

[Iulian Onofrei]

@IgnacioVazquez-Abrams, How?

[Dennis Williamson]

@IulianOnofreiIn GNU find the current directory is implied. You can omit the .

[Iulian Onofrei]

@DennisWilliamson So the problem is only on mac, where it throws the error find: illegal option -- r.

[John Hamilton]

The chosen answer is only good for files that follow a naming convention though. Thanks to your answer, I could just delete all object files in a directory. (in my case I just went with find . -name "*.o" -delete and it worked like a charm)