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Normally to remove files with spaces in their filename you would have to run:

$ rm "file name"

but if I want to remove multiple files, e.g.:

$ find . -name "*.txt" | xargs rm

This will not delete files with spaces in them.

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3 Answers 3

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You can tell find and xargs to both use null terminators

find . -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

or (simpler) use the built-in -delete action of find

find . -name "*.txt" -delete

or (thanks @kos)

find . -name "*.txt" -exec rm {} +

either of which should respect the system's ARG_MAX limit without the need for xargs.

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  • 1
    Can't upvote it twice tough :) since you mentioned ARG_MAX I'll also mention that find . -name "*.txt" -exec rm {} \; would be a "safe shot"
    – kos
    Aug 26, 2015 at 15:36
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    Thus sayeth the master: always remember xargs -0.
    – Joshua
    Aug 26, 2015 at 19:46
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    Super important point: -print0 must be the last option (or at least after -name "*.txt") otherwise this will hit files no longer limited to *.txt...
    – Kev
    Sep 8, 2018 at 9:49
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Incidentally, if you used something other than find, you can use tr to replace the newlines with null bytes.

Eg. the following one liner deletes the 10 last modified files in a directory, even if they have spaces in their names.

ls -tp | grep -v / | head -n 10 | tr "\n" "\0" | xargs -0 rm

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The xargs command uses tabs, spaces, and new lines as delimiters by default. You can tell it to only use newline characters ('\n') with the -d option:

find . -name "*.txt" | xargs -d '\n' rm

Source answer on SO.

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