Bash one liner to rm files based on content

[john_spiral]

Hi,

I need either a one liner or a bash script to recursively search a folder/sub folders for binary files (windows .lnk files) containing a specific text string. If it finds a match it must delete the file.

After googling for a number of hours I've come accross the below one liner.

Why does it not work?

find . -name '*.lnk' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -I "C:" | xargs -0 rm -f

[Arndt]

Hi,

I need either a one liner or a bash script to recursively search a folder/sub folders for binary files (windows .lnk files) containing a specific text string. If it finds a match it must delete the file.

After googling for a number of hours I've come accross the below one liner.

Why does it not work?

find . -name '*.lnk' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -I "C:" | xargs -0 rm -f

If you run it without the last part, you will see why.

find . -name '*.lnk' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -I "C:"

The output from 'grep' is not suitable as input to 'xargs'.

[john_spiral]

thanks for the heads up on grep/xargs.

Finally got it to work with the below command:

grep -r C: * | sed 's/Binary file//g' | sed 's/ matches//g' | xargs -I '{}' rm "{}"

elegant: no
works: yes