topic Re: remove file in Operating System - HP-UX

remove file

Cheung_2 — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 09:01:39 GMT

I world like to remove some files but omit one or part of these files, how to do it?

eg.
$ ls
a1 a2 a3 a4 a5
a6 ab a8 a9 a10
a1b a2b

if I run ??? rm a* ??? , then all files will be removed , how can I omit to remove a2 & a6 and the file name ended with ???b???? Thx.

Re: remove file

Robert Thorneycroft — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 09:08:11 GMT

The easiest way to do this is just tu use rm in interactive mode ie
rm -i a*
Then just answer y to the files you wish to remove.
This way will be 100 times quicker than trying to find some kind of pattern match.

Kind regards,

Robert Thorneycroft

Re: remove file

Michael Tully — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 09:09:59 GMT

One of the easiest ways is to use:

# rm -i

Re: remove file

Ralph Grothe — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 09:19:33 GMT

Just a general hint before you do any deletions,
use the shell built-in echo command to see what the shell expands your wildcards (i.e. meta characters) to.

Maybe this is not quite what you want, but remember that you can exclude certain character sets with the '!'

e.g.

echo a[!26]*

However in your case a more subtle parsing is required, where I would use commands that can handle regular expressions (e.g. grep, sed, awk, perl)

Re: remove file

Leif Halvarsson_2 — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 09:28:12 GMT

Hi,
One method you can use when you want to do something with a large number of files (not necessary removing them) is to list to a file and use a text editor to process the file. Then you can use this file as input to a script. Example:

ls a* >tmpfile

vi tmpfile

while read file
do
#do something
done

Re: remove file

Niraj Kumar Verma — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 09:39:34 GMT

#/bin/sh

for index in `ls a* |grep -v "a[26]"`
do
echo "== removing $index =="
rm -rf $index
done

-Niraj

Re: remove file

justin berkman — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 09:41:52 GMT

hi guys

command :
rm a1 a[3-5] a[8-10]

omit to remove a2 - a6 - a1b and a2b

Re: remove file

Jean-Louis Phelix — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 09:47:26 GMT

hi,

egrep (or grep -E) with multiple patterns could do it.

rm -i $(ls a* | egrep -v 'a2|a6|b$')

regards

Re: remove file

Robert Thorneycroft — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 09:47:55 GMT

Jimmy your substitution [8-10] will not work as the value in brackets will only substitute a single character, which 10 is not.

Re: remove file

justin berkman — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 10:14:28 GMT

hi guys

the correct command is :

rm a1 a[3-5] a[8-9] a10

excuse me for the error