Script for file deletion based on extension

Question

How can I delete with a script each file with an extension that is present in a list of file extensions? The list must be included in the script itself as I need to remove easily a bunch of files that are generated when I run another program.

I want to delete all the files with certain extensions from the current directory only (no subdirs) without returning errors if they don't exist.

I want to run the script from terminal. The extensions will always be the same. I need to delete e.g. some .log and .txt that are generated from another program but I don't need, so I don't need any command line arguments, just $ myscript.

I don't know pretty anything about bash scripting. I wrote some tests but I deleted them because they didn't work. In pseudocode it should be something like this:

myexts = .log, .txt, .somethingelse for ext in myexts: if exists *.ext delete *.ext 

I tried the code suggested by ilkkachu but I get

$ ./myscript find: ‘’: No such file or directory find: ‘’: No such file or directory find: ‘’: No such file or directory 

I tried to change the extensions in the list and to create files with the extensions in the original list but I always get this error.

Answer 1

Assuming you have Bash or ksh:

#!/bin/bash extensions=(c~ h~ bak) for e in "${extensions[@]}"; do find . -name "*.$e" -delete done 

Or substitute -exec rm -- {} + for -delete if your find doesn't have the latter. Of course you may also want to run a test run without -delete first to see the files that would be deleted.

The above would delete the files in all subdirectories. If you only want to delete the files in the current directory (not subdirectories), then we can use rm instead of find:

#!/bin/bash extensions=(c~ h~ bak) shopt -s nullglob for e in "${extensions[@]}"; do rm ./*."$e" done 

Or just simply

#!/bin/bash shopt -s nullglob rm -- *.c~ *.h~ *.bak 

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A more general version would take the directory and the extensions as arguments to the script:

#!/bin/sh dir=$1 shift for e in "$@"; do find "$dir" -name "*.$e" -delete done 

You'd run that with rmscript.sh /some/target/dir c~ h~ bak.