Remove accidentally extracted files [closed]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to de-unzip, de-tar -xvf — de-unarchive in a messy folder?

This is a pretty annoying occurrence. Sometimes, I download an archive (tar.gz, tar.bz2, zip, rar, etc) and run tar xf [file] (or similar) in the file's directory. In rare occasions, all the files extract in the current working directory instead of a sub-directory. This can lead to hundreds of files and hundreds of patterns that can't simply be removed using a pattern matching solution.

Is there a way to get the file contents of an archive and then delete all files on that list in the current working directory?

Answer 1

You can list the content of the archive and then pass the list to rm using xargs

Example for a tarball (test it without the rm first):

tar tfz archive.tar.gz | xargs rm -rf

Answer 2

Assuming all the files were extracted on the same date/time, you could write a one-liner and pass the regex to rm.