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I need some help with bash processing of a text file. In my effort to clean up decades worth of windows use I have written a simple command to find all the instances of a specific file - specifically all the desktop.ini files. The results of this are perfect as far as I can tell.

find . -name "desktop.ini" > ~/desktop-ini.txt gives me 1038 rows of:

./Billy Joel/Greatest Hits, Vols. 1 & 2 (1973-1985), Disc 1/desktop.ini
./Billy Joel/Greatest Hits, Vols. 1 & 2 (1973-1985), Disc 2/desktop.ini
./Billy Joel/desktop.ini

So now, I'd like to delete all these files using a shell script but as you can see there are a ton of unpredictable "special characters" that will derail the simple rm <$filepath> script. I did try (once) a single line enclosing the whole string in single (') quotes - and it worked.

rm './Aerosmith/Classics Live!, Vol. 2/desktop.ini'

But in the shell script (and replacing rm syntax with ls syntax) it crashes gloriously (of course). Can someone point me to a 'how-to' or resource (besides a general regex, sed, or awk text) to see how to handle the file path so it is presented correctly?

I thought of a few things like counting the '/' characters, finding the last one, create a new string, 'cd' to that directory, delete the file, move back to the root and repeat. This makes logical sense, but it requires the string to not break the code - which it does (so far). Thanks for any ideas on this.

Sam
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  • (1) "Can someone point me to a 'how-to' or resource…?" – Questions seeking learning material recommendations are off-topic. You can ask "how can I do this?" here and get answers here. (2) "But in the shell script (…) it crashes gloriously (…)" – What is the script exactly? How do you run it? What is the error? (3) A good answer may be a combination of this, maybe this and a command from this. – Kamil Maciorowski Oct 16 '23 at 00:47
  • You haven't been clear in how exactly you use the txt file in your script (or what exactly is your script). Assuming e.g. you have succeeded in reading each line into a variable in each iteration of a loop, normally the way is to double quote when you expand the variable. – Tom Yan Oct 16 '23 at 03:57
  • The text file from find creates the input file for the shell script to remove those files. The problem is processing the list of file.locations with all special characters in the path name(s). – Sam Oct 17 '23 at 01:05

2 Answers2

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$ find . -name "desktop.ini" | sed -re "s/^/rm '/" -e "s/$/'/"

... creates the commands to execute, so - after checking that output for correctness...

... | bash
at the end of it should then make it happen.

$ sed -re <~/desktop-ini.txt "s/^/rm '/" -e "s/$/'/" 
rm './Billy Joel/Greatest Hits, Vols. 1 & 2 (1973-1985), Disc 1/desktop.ini'
rm './Billy Joel/Greatest Hits, Vols. 1 & 2 (1973-1985), Disc 2/desktop.ini'
rm './Billy Joel/desktop.ini'
Hannu
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From your examples, it seems that you're trying to make 'find' generate a script that'll run something later, as opposed to just running something directly, even though I suspect you really wanted to just run something directly.

If you read the file names into shell variables, you can use ${...@Q} with recent Bash versions to ask it to quote a value in a way that it'd be able to dequote later. It'll handle any special character that might cause issues

find (or cat) ... | while IFS="" read -r path; do
    echo "rm ${path@Q}"
done

For older versions:

...; do
    printf 'rm %q\n' "$path"
done

But all of that is only needed if you specifically want a two-step process (i.e. generate a shell script first, run the shell script second). If all you want is to immediately run something for each line – you don't need to handle special characters at all, as long as the variable expansion itself is kept inside quotes.

find or cat | while IFS="" read -r path; do
    rm -i "$path"
done

(This works because a variable expansion is not a "macro" expansion – the interpreter recognizes 'quotes surrounding the variable' as a distinct thing from 'quotes that are part of the expanded value'. So even if $path contains a " or $ itself, that won't affect the result.)

A more conventional approach would be to have xargs run the command. Its default mode also expects quoted input, but in your case it's enough to specify \n as the separator:

find (or cat) ... | xargs -d '\n' rm -i

Finally, GNU find can also run commands by itself:

find ... -exec rm -i {} \;
find ... -ok rm {} \;

I thought of a few things like counting the '/' characters, finding the last one, create a new string, 'cd' to that directory,

That's useless; the OS already does that for you when you try to rm or ls the path.

u1686_grawity
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