Bdtyktl

I Tried to delete files that starts with A and ends with 2 numbers but It doesn't do a thing.

What I tried:

rm ^A*[0..9]2$

Where am I wrong?

You can use the following command to delete all files matching your criteria:

ls | grep -P "^A.*[0-9]{2}$" | xargs -d"n" rm

How it works:

1. ls lists all files (one by line since the result is piped).



2. 
   

   grep -P "^A.*[0-9]{2}$" filters the list of files and leaves only those that match the regular expression ^A.*[0-9]{2}$

   
   
   
   
   

   • .* indicates any number of occurrences of ., where . is a wildcard matching any character.

   
   

   • [0-9]{2} indicates exactly two occurrences of [0-9], that is, any digit.

   
   
   
   



3. xargs -d"n" rm executes rm line once for every line that is piped to it.

Where am I wrong?

For starters, rm doesn't accept a regular expression as an argument. Besides the wildcard *, every other character is treated literally.

Also, your regular expression is slightly off. For example, * means any occurrences of ... in a regular expression, so A* matches A, AA, etc. and even an empty string.

For more information, visit Regular-Expressions.info.

Or using find:

find your-directory/ -name 'A*[0-9][0-9]' -delete

This solution will deal with weird file names.

See the filename expansion section of the bash man page:

rm A*[0-9][0-9]

The solution with regexp is 200 times better, even with that you can see which file will be deleted before using the command, cutting off the final pipe:

ls | grep -P "^A.*[0-9]{2}$"

Then if it's correct just use:

ls | grep -P "^A.*[0-9]{2}$" | xargs -d "n" rm

This is 200 times better because if you work with Unix it's important to know how to use grep. It's very powerful if you know how to use it.

This works on my mac:

rm $(ls | grep -e '^A*[0..9]2$')