Is there a way to do a ' ls -R | grep “aname”* | rm; to remove multiple files in multiple directory

Question

I have installed (compiled) emerald. The command make uninstall didn't work (there is no makefile as it is just a script). So I decided to remove the file manually. But there were a lot of files.

I've tried some things but it didn't work. So I came here to ask for some advice.

• Is there a command with ls -R | grep blabla* that I can add to display file directory (it only displays filename)
• Is there a true ls -R | grep bla* | rm ?

Answer 1

If 'aname' shall be the starting part of the filename, it would be, from the current directory:

find -name "aname" -delete 

Btw.:

grep "bla"* somewhere

is almost always false, since grep already makes partial matches, which means, it finds bla, blafasel and xybla with simply

grep bla somewhere

Deleted older part of answer, because of misunderstanding:

From the current directory, if you look for the word 'aname' in all files, you can just use:

find -exec grep "aname" {} ";" -delete 

Answer 2

What you are looking for is a combination of xargs, find, and rm.

find will make a list of all the files matching your conditions, and then write them (null terminated) to stdout, which will be piped to xargs. xargs will take the null terminated strings and use them as arguments to rm.

find -L /path/to/dir -name "*name*" -print0 |xargs -0 -r  rm

source: http://linuxcommando.blogspot.com/2007/10/find-xargs-pipe.html