Question

I have a .txt file and on each line is a different file location e.g.

file1.zip
file2.zip
file3.zip

How can I open that file, loop through each line and rm -f filename on each one?

Also, will deleting it throw an error if the file doesn’t exist (has already been deleted) and if so how can I avoid this?

EDIT: The file names may have spaces in them, so this needs to be catered for as well.

Answer 1

You can use a for loop with cat to iterate through the lines:

IFS=$'\n'; \
for file in `cat list.txt`; do \
    if [ -f $file ]; then \
        rm -f "$file"; \
    fi; \
done

The if [ -f $file ] will check if the file exists and is a regular file (not a directory). If the check fails, it will skip it.

The IFS=$'\n' at the top will set the delimiter to be newlines-only; This will allow you to process files with whitespace.