Delete files with string found in file - linux cli

I am trying to delete erroneous emails based on finding the email address in the file via Linux CLI.

I can get the files with

find . | xargs grep -l [email protected]

But I cannot figure out how to delete them from there as the following code doesn't work.

rm -f | xargs find . | xargs grep -l [email protected]

Thank you for your assistance.

@Martin Beckett posted an excellent answer, please follow that guideline

solution for your command :

grep -l [email protected] * | xargs rm

Or

for file in $(grep -l email@domain.com *); do
    rm -i $file;
    #  ^ prompt for delete
done

For safety I normally pipe the output from find to something like awk and create a batch file with each line being "rm filename"

That way you can check it before actually running it and manually fix any odd edge cases that are difficult to do with a regex

find . | xargs grep -l email@domain.com | awk '{print "rm "$1}' > doit.sh
vi doit.sh // check for murphy and his law
source doit.sh

You can use find's -exec and -delete, it will only delete the file if the grep command succeeds. Using grep -q so it wouldn't print anything, you can replace the -q with -l to see which files had the string in them.

find . -exec grep -q '[email protected]' '{}' \; -delete

Despite Martin's safe answer, if you've got certainty of what you want to delete, such as in writing a script, I've used this with greater success than any other one-liner suggested before around here:

$ find . | grep -l [email protected] | xargs -I {} rm -rf {}

But I rather find by name:

$ find . -iname *something* | xargs -I {} echo {}

rm -f `find . | xargs grep -li email@domain.com`

does the job better. Use `...` to run the command to offer the file names containing [email protected] (grep -l lists them, -i ignores case) to remove them with rm (-f forcibly / -i interactively).

I liked Martin Beckett's solution but found that file names with spaces could trip it up (like who uses spaces in file names, pfft :D). Also I wanted to review what was matched so I move the matched files to a local folder instead of just deleting them with the 'rm' command:

# Make a folder in the current directory to put the matched files
$ mkdir -p './matched-files'

# Create a script to move files that match the grep
# NOTE: Remove "-name '*.txt'" to allow all file extensions to be searched.
# NOTE: Edit the grep argument 'something' to what you want to search for.

$ find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -al 'something' | awk -F '\n' '{ print "mv \""$0"\" ./matched-files" }' > doit.sh

Or because its possible (in Linux, idk about other OS's) to have newlines in a file name you can use this longer, untested if works better (who puts newlines in filenames? pfft :D), version:

$ find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -alZ 'something' | awk -F '\0' '{ for (x=1; x<NF; x++) print "mv \""$x"\" ./matched-files" }' > doit.sh

# Evaluate the file following the 'source' command as a list of commands executed in the current context:
$ source doit.sh

---

NOTE: I had issues where grep could not match inside files that had utf-16 encoding. See here for a workaround. In case that website disappears what you do is use grep's -a flag which makes grep treat files as text and use a regex pattern that matches any first-byte in each extended character. For example to match Entité do this:

grep -a 'Entit.e'

and if that doesn't work then try this:

grep -a 'E.n.t.i.t.e'

find . | xargs grep -l [email protected]

how to remove:

rm -f 'find . | xargs grep -l [email protected]'