Shell command/script to delete files whose names are in a text file

Question

I have a list of files in a .txt file (say list.txt). I want to delete the files in that list. I haven't done scripting before. Could some give the shell script/command I can use. I have bash shell.

Answer 1

while read -r filename; do
  rm "$filename"
done <list.txt

is slow.

rm $(<list.txt)

will fail if there are too many arguments.

I think it should work:

xargs -a list.txt -d'\n' rm

Answer 2

Try this command:

rm -f $(<file)

Answer 3

If the file names have spaces in them, none of the other answers will work; they'll treat each word as a separate file name. Assuming the list of files is in list.txt, this will always work:

while read name; do
  rm "$name"
done < list.txt

Answer 4

The following should work and leaves you room to do other things as you loop through.

Edit: Don't do this, see here: http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html

for file in $(cat list.txt); do rm $file; done

Answer 5

For fast execution on macOS, where xargs custom delimiter d is not possible:

<list.txt tr "\n" "\0" | xargs -0 rm

Answer 6

On linux, you can try:

printf "%s\n" $(<list.txt) | xargs -I@ rm @

In my case, my .txt file contained a list of items of the kind *.ext and worked fine.