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Aceso
Aceso

Reputation: 1215

removing files with numerals in the beginning of the file name

I'm working with Ubuntu recently and I have been asked to remove files with numerals at the beginning.

How do I remove ordinary files from current directory that have numerals at the first three characters?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1319

Answers (3)

tripleee
tripleee

Reputation: 189377

Since nobody else bothered to post this,

rm [0-9][0-9][0-9]*

Upvotes: 6

Roland
Roland

Reputation: 6543

How about something like

ls | egrep '^[0-9]{3}' | xargs rm

The ls lists all the files, the egrep filters the list so that it only contains filenames that start with three digits, and the xargs applies rm to each of the filenamess that egrep lets through.

Upvotes: 0

poplitea
poplitea

Reputation: 3737

First of all: Be careful when trying out such delete commands! Try running in a directory with test files or files that are backed up well.

You could try something like this from shell:

find . -regex './[0-9]{3}.*' -exec 'rm {}' \;

For debugging, try running it without the rm-command first, listing the files that will be deleted:

find . -regex './[0-9]{3}.*'

You may have to escape the curly braces - at least I had to in FreeBSD, using zsh-shell:

find . -regex './[0-9]\{3\}.*'

Upvotes: 3

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