basic command pipe question

[Don Russell]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-06-18 at 22:47, Don Russell wrote:
>
>   
>> I see how
>>     ls | grep -i '\.zip$' | xargs rm
>> is the preferred method of the three above....
>>
>> But... in reading the man pages for xargs, it says this may be 
>> problematic if the file name contain blanks.
>>     
>
> If you don't mind directory recursion:
>
> find -iname '*.zip' -print0 |xargs -0 rm
>
>
>   
>> What's your opinion of
>>     rm *.[zZ][iI][pP]
>>
>> Although, if I understand properly what's happening here, the pipe 
>> solution allows files to be erased as they are found in the filelist, 
>> while the gobbing method first requires that all files that match be 
>> found, then each command is executed one after another. 
>>     
>
> No, this is the most efficient if it fits the command line buffer.
> The shell expands the file list and gives the expanded command
> line to one invocation of rm.

Ah.... I see...

So the most *robust* would be:

ls -a | grep --null -iE \\.zip$ | xargs --null rm -f

That would erase all file ending with any .zip in any combination of 
upper and lower case characters, even if the file namehave any embedded 
spaces or other "special" characters.

Don