Re: basic command pipe question

Todd Zullinger wrote:

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Don Russell wrote:

I need some basic CLI help. :-) I've googled, and read, and I can't
find how to erase a bunch of files in one go.

Specifically, I need a command that will erase *.zip files,
regardless of the text case of the .zip part....

So far, I have
   ls | grep -iE \\.zip$

That gives me the correct list of files.... but I don't know how to
get rm to process that list.. It doesn't look like rm has an option
to read the file name from stdin, it's expecting the file name as a
CLI argument.

This is one of those things that you could do a whole lot of ways and
I'm sure more than a few people will provide options.  I'm looking
forward to learning a few new things out of this too (it always
happens, no matter how well I think I know the possibilities :).

Here are a few ways:

    ls | grep -iE \\.zip$ | xargs rm -f

You could use find instead of ls and grep too.  This example is
almost straight from the xargs man page:

    find -iname '*.zip' | xargs rm -f

Or, using some bash command substitution:

    rm -f $(ls | grep -iE \\.zip$)

Ah HA! I tried ALMOST that.... I left out the $ before the (

Anyway... thanks for that.... I can see that's a concept I need to remember.

Thanks to all who replied.... I'll go with rm -f *.[zZ][iI][pP]

Of course, it's best to run these without the -f option or only on a
copy of your files until you're sure that it works as you expect it to
work.

Yes, I've been doing that and then replying "n" to the prompts.... :-)

I know this is basic stuff.... I'm obviously missing some fundamental concept of command line processing. :-)

You're just missing a few new commands in your mental storage.  With
many thousands of them, it takes a long time to learn and remember the
myriad ways things can be used.  :)

Thanks :-)

I learned a few things in the various replies. :-)