Linux: How to Delete All Files from Recently Unzipped

Let’s say that you just unzipped files from a folder and you forgot to specify a destination directory. Now you have your home folder fully of thousands of new files. How do you clean up this mess?

Run this Command

/bin/zipinfo -1 1.0.0-rhel.7-x64.zip | xargs echo rm -rf | sh

What does this Command Do?

• If the file that you just unzipped files from was 1.0.0-rhel.7-x64.zip which has but 200+ files it would be quite a mess if it was in, lets say, your home directory
• first you need to run /bin/zipinfo -1 to list only the file names in the zip file
• pipe that to xargs with takes input or stdin, but we want to echo or print every command it ends up running to stdout.
  • xargs echo rm -rf
  • This command should be thought of as echo rm -rf {filename}
• Finally, so we can the output of the xargs commands, we pipe that to sh which will print that to stdout.
  • | sh