Question

I want to remove a group of same extension files with different file name in different folders from my pen drive, I tried with the following commend, but its not working.

$sudo find /media/<Pendrive> *.jpg | rm -rf *

could someone let me know the exact command to delete the files from my Pendrive.

Answer 1

You can write:

sudo find '/media/<Pendrive>' -name '*.jpg' -exec rm -f '{}' ';'

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okay, If I’m exporting all the file paths to a text file and now I want to delete the files by using awk commend would it be possible in this case.

If the text file is named all_file_paths.txt, then you can write:

while IFS= read -r file_to_delete ; do
  if [[ "$file_to_delete" == *.jpg ]] ; then
    sudo rm -f "$file_to_delete"
  fi
done < all_file_paths.txt

(where the command IFS= read -r file_to_delete reads one line from standard input — which in this case is coming from all_file_paths.txt — and stores that line in the variable $file_to_delete).

Note that this approach will misbehave if any file-paths contain the newline character. There’s no reliable way around that, since you’ve already discarded the distinction between “end of file-path” and “newline inside file-path” when you created all_file_paths.txt.