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There are hundreds of .html files in a directory. I need to delete files that don't contain word bluecar in their contents.

I thought sed with rm would do that, but I don't know how to combine them.

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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

This should work using grep:

grep -L bluecar *.html | xargs rm
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3  
This not work for files with spaces in names. – php-coder May 17 '11 at 4:23
Thanks for the tip – Chris J May 19 '11 at 2:08
This is easily fixed to work with filenames with spaces, at least with GNU tools: grep -ZL bluecar *.html | xargs -0 rm. I'd edit it in, but I see @php-coder already put in an answer with this... – derobert Nov 28 '12 at 17:03
won't this remove those that do contain bluecar? – amphibient Mar 12 at 20:53
1  
@amphibient -L is --files-without-match – Chris J Mar 12 at 22:55
up vote 4 down vote

With GNU grep/xargs you may use

grep -LZ -- str *.html | xargs -r0 rm
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up vote 4 down vote

The find tool is the usual one to use.

find . -name "*.html" \( -exec grep -q bluecar {} \; -o -exec rm {} \; \)

or

find . -name "*.html" ! -exec grep -q bluecar {} \; -exec rm {} \;

But try it on a copy first...

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Does this really take only arguments that returned a success code from the first exec and run them in the second or does it just run the full argument list through both execs? – Caleb May 17 '11 at 9:54
@Caleb: Yes, -exec is true iff the command returns 0, and the find boolean operators short-circuit. – Gilles May 17 '11 at 11:40
@gilles Thanks for fixing that. – Keith May 17 '11 at 19:55
Is there some reason to use -exec rm … instead of -delete? -delete is generally much more efficient (saves a fork/exec per file). – derobert Nov 28 '12 at 17:05
@derobert No reason other than I'm not sure older versions of find have that action, and my habit of just using exec. – Keith Nov 28 '12 at 18:16

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