Linux: Removing files that don’t contain all the words specified

bashfilelinuxshell

Inside a directory, how can I delete files that lack any of the words specified, so that only files that contain ALL the words are left? I tried to write a simple bash shell script using grep and rm commands, but I got lost. I am totally new to Linux, any help would be appreciated

Best Solution

How about:

grep -L foo *.txt | xargs rm
grep -L bar *.txt | xargs rm

If a file does not contain foo, then the first line will remove it.

If a file does not contain bar, then the second line will remove it.

Only files containing both foo and bar should be left

-L, --files-without-match
     Suppress normal output; instead print the  name  of  each  input
     file from which no output would normally have been printed.  The
     scanning will stop on the first match.

See also @Mykola Golubyev's post for placing in a loop.

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Unix – Use grep –exclude/–include syntax to not grep through certain files

Use the shell globbing syntax:

grep pattern -r --include=\*.cpp --include=\*.h rootdir

The syntax for --exclude is identical.

Note that the star is escaped with a backslash to prevent it from being expanded by the shell (quoting it, such as --include="*.cpp", would work just as well). Otherwise, if you had any files in the current working directory that matched the pattern, the command line would expand to something like grep pattern -r --include=foo.cpp --include=bar.cpp rootdir, which would only search files named foo.cpp and bar.cpp, which is quite likely not what you wanted.

Update 2021-03-04

I've edited the original answer to remove the use of brace expansion, which is a feature provided by several shells such as Bash and zsh to simplify patterns like this; but note that brace expansion is not POSIX shell-compliant.

The original example was:

grep pattern -r --include=\*.{cpp,h} rootdir

to search through all .cpp and .h files rooted in the directory rootdir.

Linux – How to remove all .svn directories from the application directories

Try this:

find . -name .svn -exec rm -rf '{}' \;

Before running a command like that, I often like to run this first:

find . -name .svn -exec ls '{}' \;

Best Solution

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Unix – Use grep –exclude/–include syntax to not grep through certain files

Linux – How to remove all .svn directories from the application directories

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