cleaning out the home directory

dcstimm · Guru Joined: 19 Jun 2002 Posts: 321

Hey guys,

I have been looking for a easy way of cleaning out my home directory, and i found it would be easy to

ls > blah

then go though blah with vi and dd to all the files I want to keep, and have a basic list off all the packages I want to delete.

How I have a list of packages that I wish to delete, is there a simple command or script I could make that could read the blah file and delete anything that is in it?

Just a question..

it would be easier than doing rm file.tar.gz rm -rf direcotry
or using a GUI file manager.

thanks!

rac · Posted: Mon Aug 12, 2002 11:52 pm Post subject:

How about:

dcstimm · Guru Joined: 19 Jun 2002 Posts: 321

okay I tried it but I get this:

cat blah | xargs rm -rf
xargs: unmatched single quote

i need the -rf to delete the directories listed in the blah file

rac · Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2002 12:53 am Post subject:

Adding -rf shouldn't cause any problems. You may need to escape (by preceding with a \ inside blah) ugly bad characters like ' and space that are no fun to have in Unix filenames in general.
_________________
For every higher wall, there is a taller ladder

Naan Yaar · Bodhisattva Joined: 27 Jun 2002 Posts: 1549

Try:

puddpunk · l33t Joined: 20 Jul 2002 Posts: 681 Location: New Zealand

Go into your /home dir and type:

rm -ir *

it will interactively ask you which files you want to delete.

masseya · Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2002 2:13 pm Post subject:

arkane · l33t Joined: 30 Apr 2002 Posts: 918 Location: Phoenix, AZ

You know, this is one of those tasks that I'd hvae to say a GUI has a massive advantage over. Not downing the command prompt, but the GUI is excellent for this type of thing.

Gotta love the ability to hold down the ctrl key and select things, then hitting delete and watch them go bye-bye.

Well, sometimes... under KDE you have to empty the trashcan.

masseya · Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2002 5:49 pm Post subject:

arkane · l33t Joined: 30 Apr 2002 Posts: 918 Location: Phoenix, AZ

proxy · Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2002 6:24 pm Post subject:

err, why not just do:

Naan Yaar · Bodhisattva Joined: 27 Jun 2002 Posts: 1549

This will not work if there are spaces in filenames in blah.

proxy · Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2002 7:20 pm Post subject:

do'h! see i knew it was too easy

proxy

Naan Yaar · Bodhisattva Joined: 27 Jun 2002 Posts: 1549

This will work with most stuff you throw at it:
cat blah | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs --null rm -r

It replaces newlines with '\0's and then runs xargs with the --null arg (which will make it not treat spaces and quotes as special chars and use '\0' as the separator).