Removing only my files in Unix

Question

I need to rm files from a unix directory that only belong to my id. I tried building this command, but to no avail:

ls -la | grep 'myid' | awk ' { print $9 } ' | rm

My result: Usage: rm [-firRe] [--] File...

Answer 1

find . -user myuser -print0 |xargs -0 rm

Put your own userid (or maybe user number) in for "myuser".

Answer 2

try with -find- where you can search for files belonging to a user and then delete them

man find

so: find . -user uname -delete

Answer 3

rm does not accept a list of files to delete on the stdin (which is what you are doing by passing it through the pipe.

Try this

find . -type f -user username -exec rm -f {} \;

Answer 4

rm doesn't read from stdin.

find -user $(whoami) -delete

Please always test without the delete first.

Answer 5

You're missing a xargs before the rm.

Answer 6

You could use find:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -user myid -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f

Drop the -maxdepth 1 if you want it to handle subdirectories as well.

Answer 7

You were really close. Try:

rm `ls -la | grep 'myid' | awk ' { print $9 } '`

Note that those are backticks, not single quotes surrounding the first three segments from your original pipeline. Also for me the filename column was $8, but if $9 is the right column for you, then that should do it.