CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbashmacosfind
JimRomeFan
JimRomeFan

Reputation: 413

Delete files that don't match a particular string format

I have a set of files that are named similarly:

TEXT_TEXT_YYYYMMDD

Example file name:

My_House_20170426

I'm trying to delete all files that don't match this format. Every file should have a string of text followed by an underscore, followed by another string of text and another underscore, then a date stamp of YYYYMMDD.

Can someone provide some advice on how to build a find or a remove statement that will delete files that don't match this format?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1719

Answers (2)

Harvey
Harvey

Reputation: 5821

Using find, add -delete to the end once you're sure it works.

# gnu find
find . -regextype posix-egrep -type f -not -iregex '.*/[a-z]+_[a-z]+_[0-9]{8}'

# OSX find
find -E . -type f -not -iregex '.*/[a-z]+_[a-z]+_[0-9]{8}'

Intentionally only matching alphabetical characters for TEXT. Add 0-9 to each TEXT area like this [a-z0-9] if you need numbers.

Upvotes: 6

guest
guest

Reputation: 6718

grep -v '(pattern)'

will filter out lines that match a pattern, leaving those that don't match. You might try piping in the output of ls. And if you're particularly brave, you could pipe the output to something like xargs rm. But deleting is kinda scary, so maybe save the output to a file first, look at it, then delete the files listed.

Upvotes: 1

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