Delete files except the file names available in the Except File

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I need some help in the below scenario.

I need to delete all the files from the directory except the file name available in the Except file.

Like the folder ABC have files like A1.txt,A2.txt......A10.txt
and also have a file named Except.txt with the content A3.txt,A4.txt

Need a unix command to delete all the files from the folder ABC except the files A3.txt,A4.txt looking up on the Except.txt file.

Thanks for the response.

2

How about

ls -1 | grep -vf except - | xargs echo rm

xargs is not necessarily the tool of choice for more complicated situations. Should files exist e.g. with non-alpha chars in their name, additional measures need to be taken.

3 
while read f
do
rm $f
done <Except.txt

will delete all the files listed in except.txt

Don,
You should have deleted the post. I was using my phone and could not see all of the question at once, cause I'm old and need big print, and got the question backwards.

4

Below Sample command to exclude file in the code itself but i need to get the file names looked up from another file.

f

ind *.* '!' -name 'test1.txt' '!' -name 'text2.txt' -type f -mtime +20

I need something like below to look up the file name from lookup file

find *.* '!' -name "Except lookup file" -type f -mtime +20

Thanks for the response.

5

In post#2, replace the ls -1 with your find command.

6

You should use caution with the grep command. You may not get exactly the results you expect.

jack@veritron ~ $ cat t3
abc.txt
1abc.txt
abc.txt1
jack@veritron ~ $ grep abc.txt t3
abc.txt
1abc.txt
abc.txt1
jack@veritron ~ $ grep ^abc.txt$ t3
abc.txt
jack@veritron ~ $
7

Yes, true! But false positives, in this case, would not remove too many but too few files, and you might want to add the -w or -x options to match entire words or lines only.