Linux remove file with spaces

How to delete all files with filenames containing spaces on Linux? [duplicate]

I managed to delete everything myself using vi to edit the temporary file, after discovering that there were also filenames which contained parenthesis — which the shell also does not like.

2 Answers 2

Alright, let’s do this progressively.

And let’s presume that you really do want to look in subdirectories as well, even though that’s only implied in your question.

As a first pass, this is just a simple exercise in passing a wildcard to the find command, remembering to quote it of course, and executing the rm command for every file found:

find $BASE_DIR/ -name '* *' -exec rm <> \; 

But of course that’s dreadfully inefficient. It starts up a whole rm process for each individual file. So while we could take a short detour through \+ that’s not where we are going to end up, so let’s take the shorter route and bring in xargs to batch up the filenames into groups:

find $BASE_DIR/ -name '* *' -print | xargs rm 

But that has two security holes. First, if any filename found happens to begin with a minus sign rm will treat it as a command-line option rather than a filename, and generate an error. (The -exec rm <> version also has this problem.) Second, filenames containing whitespace will not be handled properly by xargs , as you’ve noticed. So a further iteration is to make this a little more bulletproof:

find $BASE_DIR/ -name '* *' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -- 

And, of course, there are the interactive features of rm that you probably don’t want:

find $BASE_DIR/ -name '* *' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f -- 

The -print0 and -0 options are not standard, but the GNU find and xargs , as well as the FreeBSD find and xargs , understand them. However, even this is improvable. We don’t need to spawn any extra processes at all. The GNU and FreeBSD find s can both invoke the unlink(2) system call directly:

find $BASE_DIR/ -name '* *' -delete 

As a last preventative measure to stop you doing more than you intended in certain circumstances, remember that the filesystem can contain more than just regular files:

find $BASE_DIR/ -name '* *' -type f -delete 

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Deleting files with spaces in their names

I am trying to delete all the files with a space in their names. I am using following command. But it is giving me an error Command : ls | egrep ‘. ‘ | xargs rm Here if I am using only ls | egrep ‘. ‘ command it is giving me all the file name with spaces in the filenames. But when I am trying to pass the output to rm, all the spaces (leading or trailing) gets deleted. So my command is not getting properly executed. Any pointers on how to delete the file having atleast one space in their name?

6 Answers 6

You can use standard globbing on the rm command:

This will delete any file whose name contains a space; the space is escaped so the shell doesn’t interpret it as a separator. Adding — will avoid problems with filenames starting with dashes (they won’t be interpreted as arguments by rm ).

If you want to confirm each file before it’s deleted, add the -i option:

You will DEFINITELY want to run this through an echo first, to guard from typos. Add echo at the front and it will print out all the files it’s going to remove.

Anuj, the reason why this has the most upvotes is that because though find is powerful, sometimes you don’t need to kill the chicken with a machine gun. UNIX administrators would generally not resort to find to (for example) «remove all files beginning with the letter A». one would simply rm A* . Likewise to remove files containing spaces, rm can do the job. In other words, don’t be fooled because space is invisible and is treated specially by the shell. Simply escape it, as Stephen Kitt has done, and you can think of it like any other character.

I would avoid parsing ls output

find . -type f -name '* *' -delete 

Although this is recursive and will delete all files with space in current directory and nested directories, as mentionned in comments.

(1) you can use -name ‘* *’ instead of the regex; and (2) you can use -print0 | xargs -0 rm -i to address @StephenKitt’s concern.

Look at this Suppose name «strange file»

find . -inum "numberoofinode" -exec rm <> \; 

In case of very strange file names like

xargs reads items from the standard input, delimited by blanks (which can be protected with double or single quotes or a backslash) or newlines, and executes the command (default is /bin/echo) one or more times with any initial-arguments followed by items read from standard input. Blank lines on the standard input are ignored.

We can (mostly) fix your initial command by changing the xargs delimiter to a newline:

ls | egrep ‘. ‘ | xargs -d ‘\n’ rm (don’t do this. read on)

But what if the filename contains a newline?

touch «filename with blanks and newline»

Because Unix filenames can contain blanks and newlines, this default behaviour is often problematic; filenames containing blanks and/or newlines are incorrectly processed by xargs. In these situations it is better to use the -0 option, which prevents such problems.

ls is really a tool for direct consumption by a human, instead we need to use the find command which can separate the filenames with a null character ( -print0 ). We also need to tell grep to use null characters to separate the input ( -z ) and output ( -Z ). Finally, we tell xargs to also use null characters ( -0 )

find . -type f -print0 | egrep ‘. ‘ -z -Z | xargs -0 rm

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How do I delete files with spaces in them in bash script?

this is a three part topic to a two part process that still is not working for me: Objective: to manipulate a filename then delete it the filename has spaces between the words then the dot .ext Solution: 1) remove all the white space between the words making on long string of chars with no white space between then then delete that file. or 2) place quotes on both sides of the filename with spaces then delete that file. what I did to get my solution. using three different way to reach my solution for the first part of my objective, still not reaching my solution for the second part of my objective. first how I got my filename out of a directory into a variable.

 find $PWD -name "*.mp3" | while [ $xf -le $MAXNUM ] ; do read FILENAME; 

the variable $FILENAME returned the complete path/filename ‘/home/userx/ffmpegdir/sub/file with — lots of spaces and __ —— _ &&. *# $$ LSD —-in the name _(3).mp3′ I used basename to strip the filename off that string to give me just the filename using just the pref and ext variables. #strip the old file name off the path from FILENAME

 c=$FILENAME xpath=$ xbase=$ xfext=$ xpref=$ path=$ pref=$ ext=$

 #puts quote marks on both sides of the file #with spaces adding the dot (.) # extention "mp3" giving me a new file name #with the same ext. differentquotes="$.$" 

when I call rm to remove the file I add quotes around that file name like this

that calls to the rm like this with the quotes on both end of the file

then all I get is a return error like this

rm: cannot remove `»file with — lots of spaces and __ —— _ &&. *# $$ LSD —-in the name _(3).mp3″‘: No such file or directory

so I decided to try just removing all the spaces between the file name then tried to delete it like this

 oldname="$.$" echo "$" "the hole name now is that " echo echo "calling rm" "$\"\"" rm "$" 

and I got this result, it removed all the spaces between the file name but I still received an error return from rm.

• oldname=’filewith—lotsofspacesand_——&&. *#$$LSD—-inthename_(3).mp3′
• rm ‘filewith—lotsofspacesand_——&&. *#$$LSD—-inthename_(3).mp3′ rm: cannot remove `filewith—lotsofspacesand_——&&. *#$$LSD—-inthename_(3).mp3′: No such file or directory

so I then tried it like this. I removed all the space within just the pref var first while assigning it to another var name then put the ext on to it then tried to remove it and got this with the same error

 anothernewname="$" echo $ putthemtogether="$.$" echo $ rm "$" 

I removed all the spaces between the words in just the pref : + anothernewname=’filewith—lotsofspacesand_——&&. *#$$LSD—-inthename_(3)’

then I put the ext back onto the different variable name here:

then I called rm to remove it and still got the same error :

rm: cannot remove `filewith—lotsofspacesand_——&&. *#$$LSD—-inthename_(3).mp3′: No such file or directory + echo

all three times I get the same error- No such file or directory

what is the answer to “what I am doing wrong so that I no longer do it?”

added this: I just tried this: adding the path vatiable to tell it where it is path/filename

 rm: cannot remove `/home/userx/ffmpegdir/sub/"file with -- lots of spaces and ____ ----- ___ &&. *# $$ LSD ----in the name _(3).mp3"': No such file or directory 

if I put that into the terminal just like that it would work: rm path/»file name with spaces.ext» just as it reads above — is that not a yes, too?

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Linux Shell Tip: Remove files with names that contains spaces, and special characters such as -, —

In Linux or Unix-like system you may come across file names with special characters such as:

In this quick tip I am going to show you to delete or copy files with names that contain strange characters on Linux.

Sample file list

Here is a sample list of file names:

The problem and solution

Your default bash shell considers many of these special characters (also known as meta-characters) as commands. If you try to delete or move/copy such files you may end up with errors. In this example, I am trying to delete a file named ‘>file’:

rm: missing operand Try `rm --help' for more information.

The rm command failed to delete the file due to strange character in filename.

Tip #1: Put filenames in quotes

The following command is required to copy or delete files with spaces in their name, for example:

$ cp "my resume.doc" /secure/location/ $ rm "my resume.doc"

The quotes also prevent the many special characters interpreted by your shell, for example:

The double quotes preserve the value of all characters enclosed, except for the dollar sign, the backticks and the backslash. You can also try single quotes as follows:

$ rm -v 'a long file name here' $ cp 'my mp3 file.mp3' /backup/disk/

Tip #2: Try a backslash

You can always insert a backslash () before the special character in your filename:

$ cp "my resume.doc" /secure/location/ $ rm "*file"

Tip #3: Try a ./ at the beginning of the filename

The syntax is as follows to delete a file called ‘-file’:

The ./ at the beginning of the filename forces rm not to interpret – as option to the rm command.

Tip #4: Try a — at the beginning of the filename

A — signals the end of options and disables further option processing by shell. Any arguments after the — are treated as filenames and arguments. An argument of – is equivalent to –. The syntax is:

$ rm -v -- -file $ rm -v -- --file $ rm -v -- "@#$%^&file" $ rmdir -v -- "--dirnameHere"

Tip #5: Remove file by an inode number

The -i option to ls displays the index number (inode) of each file:

Use find command as follows to delete the file if the file has inode number 4063242:

$ find . -inum 4063242 -delete

$ find . -inum 4063242 -exec rm -i <> ;

Sample session:

For more information and options about the find, rm, and bash command featured in this tip, type the following command at the Linux prompt, to read man pages:

$ man find $ man rm $ man bash

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