Deleting files based on content: using find, grep, xargs and rm

Today a user asked me to help remove a deluge of spam from their inbox, since they had been flooded by a particular spammer. Well, everyone makes mistakes sometimes and today was my day: I made a mistake with -print in the find command and accidentally deleted all of the users's email. Whoops.

All the spam contained the the word "Desv" as part of the from. I could have used grep, but there were so many files in the directory that grep -i Desv * complained that the argument list was too long - this is a nice "safety" feature of bash that wasn't always there. Someone figured they should limit the shell globbing of * so it couldn't generate a gigantic list that could cause buffer overruns. So I had to use find to get around the file glob size restriction. The right syntax for find turned out to be:

    find . -exec grep -l Desv {} \; | xargs rm