Deleting the listings that is filtered while producing an output

Question

I have a directory with a bunch of files extensions mixed and I would like to list a specific file extension (maybe something like grep *.mp3) and while listing, delete them with an output. How can I do that or if there's a dupe, please feel free to tag me in.

Example:

grep "*.mp3" . | rm -fr 

Answer 1

Let's start with a directory with three mp3 files:

$ ls *mp3
a.mp3  b.mp3  c.mp3

Now, let's delete them after we list what we are deleting:

$ find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.mp3' -printf 'Deleting %p\n' -delete
Deleting ./a.mp3
Deleting ./b.mp3
Deleting ./c.mp3

After this is done, the mp3 files are gone:

$ ls *mp3
ls: cannot access '*mp3': No such file or directory

How it works

• `find .

  This starts a find command. It will look for files in the current directory, ..

• -maxdepth 1

  By default, find recursively searches subdirectories. This tells it not to do that. With -maxdepth 1, the command find will only look at what it finds in the current directory and not explore any of the current directory's subdirectories.

• -name '*.mp3'

  This tells find to look only for files with the .mp3 extension.

• -printf 'Deleting %p\n'

  This tells find to print a message about each file found.

  You can, of course, change this to another message if you like. If you don't want a message, then this option can be omitted entirely.

• -delete

  This tells find to delete each file.

Case insensitive search

If you also want to find files named .MP3 or .Mp3 etc., then we need a case-insensitive search and we use -iname:

find . -maxdepth 1 -iname '*.mp3' -printf 'Deleting %p\n' -delete

Answer 2

You want find...

find . -type f -iname "*.mp3"

By default it will recurse to subdirectories, so if you are getting more files than you want, add -maxdepth 1 to search in the current directory only. After checking that the output is what you want to delete, you can do it again (thank you up-arrow...) and add -delete.

find . -type f -iname "*.mp3" -delete

. is the current working directory - you can give the path to the directory here instead if you are not in it...

To make it interactive, you could use -exec to define your own action instead of find's -delete action

find . -type f -iname "*.mp3" -exec rm -i -- {} \;

Then it will prompt you before deleting each file...

Answer 3

When you want to delete only items in current directory, it is sufficient to use the wildcard like so:

$ ls *.jpeg
birthday2016_001.jpeg  birthday2016_002.jpeg  birthday2016_003.jpeg
$ rm *.jpeg
$ ls *.jpeg
ls: cannot access '*.jpeg': No such file or directory

As you can see, in the example above, all files with .jpeg extension got removed. Listing them , is the same idea - echo *.jpeg and ls *.jpeg. So you essentially could do simply ls *.mp3 && rm *.mp3 for your case

Python alternative:

In my case, I was removing .jpeg file, so adjust the code below as necessary:

 python -c 'import os,sys;[(sys.stdout.write(i + "\n"),os.unlink(i)) for i in os.listdir(".")  if i.endswith(".jpeg")]'

Sample run:

$ ls *.jpeg
birthday2016_001.jpeg  birthday2016_002.jpeg  birthday2016_003.jpeg     
$ python -c 'import os,sys;[(sys.stdout.write(i + "\n"),os.unlink(i)) for i in os.listdir(".")  if i.endswith(".jpeg")]'
birthday2016_003.jpeg
birthday2016_001.jpeg
birthday2016_002.jpeg
$ ls *.jpeg
ls: cannot access '*.jpeg': No such file or directory