I recently had cause to remove all files with a particular name and containing a particular string from some production servers. Below is the Gist I used to do it. The first part of the script is some basic validations, but line 43 is where the main work is done. We first `find` all files named `example.html`, we then pass those to `grep` to check for the string, and, if the string is found, finally we pass the file paths to `rm` to verbosely (so we have a record of what was removed) remove them.
While checking this script, my colleague Sean introduced me to Shell Check, which in turn pointed to two ways I could tighten the original script:
Firstly, and most simply, I wasn’t quoting the `$PATH_TO_INSTALLS` on line 43 in the script; this could have caused issues if my file path contained spaces. This was fixed pretty easily.
Secondly, and along similar lines, I was not aware that `xargs` might interpret said spaces in unexpected and inglorious ways. To fix this, I’ve added `-print0` to the `find` command and `-0` to my `xargs` commands.
| #!/bin/bash | |
| # | |
| # Remove all files called example.html and | |
| # containing the string | |
| # "<title>Genericons</title> | |
| # | |
| # Copyright Automattic Inc, 2015 | |
| # | |
| # This script is free software, and is released under the | |
| # terms of the GPL version 2 or (at your option) any | |
| # later version. | |
| # | |
| # See | |
| # — | |
| # | |
| # https://cftp.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/187 | |
| # | |
| # Usage | |
| # —– | |
| # | |
| # # Process updates for all admin users in all instances | |
| # ./remove-genericons-example-html.sh /var/www/html/ | |
| # | |
| PATH_TO_INSTALLS=$1 | |
| RED='\e[0;31m' | |
| GREEN='\e[0;32m' | |
| NC='\e[0m' # No Color | |
| # VALIDATIONS | |
| if [ -z "$PATH_TO_INSTALLS" ]; then | |
| echo -e "${RED}Please provide a path to the installs, e.g. './remove-genericons-example-html.sh /var/www/html/'.${NC}" | |
| exit 1 | |
| fi | |
| if [ ! -d "$PATH_TO_INSTALLS" ]; then | |
| echo -e "${RED}The directory ${PATH_TO_INSTALLS} does not exist.${NC}" | |
| exit 20 | |
| fi | |
| find "$PATH_TO_INSTALLS" -name example.html -print0 | xargs -0 grep -lIZ "<title>Genericons</title>" | xargs -0 rm -fv — | |
| echo -e "${GREEN}Recursively removed all example.html files containing '<title>Genericons</title>', starting at ${PATH_TO_INSTALLS}. See output above for details.${NC}" | |
| exit 0 |
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