Unix delete with find: Delete all files that are listed in a file

In my root directory, I have a couple folders named something like AA, BB, CC etc., each containing files in the format AA1001.txt, BB1002.txt etc. In my root folder, I also have a file all_to_delete which has a bunch of file names separated with newlines, thus looking something like this:

AA1004.txt

BB3004.txt

BB3005.txt ...

I now want to go through all subdirs in my root directory and delete all files that match the given filename. Until now, I have tried something like:

while read line; do find . -type f -name $line -exec rm -f {} \;; done Though, this cannot work as already while read line; do find . -type f -name $line; done does not match any file (as the find gives its output as ./AA/AA1001.txt ...)

Do you guys have a solution for me?

Given a file with filenames, the easiest thing to do would be to read it line by line, and pass it to find. However, this will result in a separate instance of find for each file name and can become very slow for large lists of files and many files in a directory tree.

Instead, I would do something like this:

find . -type f -name "*txt" | grep -wFf to_delete.txt | xargs -I{} rm '{}'

The trick is to give grep your file as a list of patterns to search for (-f). The -F makes sure your filenames are treated as strings and not regular expressions, that way your file names ca contain special characters like * or [ or |. You then pass to xargs and use quoted '{}', otherwise it fails on white space, to delete the files.

NOTE: This assumes that your file names are all unique, that one name cannot be contained in another. For example, that you don't have files called foo and foobar. If you do, given a pattern foo, this will delete both files. To avoid this use:

while IFS= read -r line; do find . -name "$line" -delete; done < to_delete.txt 

From man find:

   -delete
          Delete files; true if removal succeeded. 

How literal is your description of your problem?  Are the directory names all two characters?  Will file BB3004.txt always be in directory BB?  If yes, then you don’t need find; just extract the directory name from the first two characters of the file name:

while read -r line
do
    dir=$(expr "$line" : '\(..\)')
    echo rm "$dir/$line"
    rm "$dir/$line"
done < all_to_delete

There are many different ways to accomplish that, but here's how I'd do it:

Created a test dir with a few files in it:

% ls ./teste
lala  lele  lolo  lulu

Created a file listing the ones I'd like to delete:

% cat to_delete.txt 
lele
lolo
lulu

Here I loop trough each line of the 'to_delete.txt' file passing the file name to the find command and then finally removing them:

% while read filename; do find ./teste -name ${filename} -print0 | xargs -0 rm -vf; done < to_delete.txt 
removed `./teste/lele'
removed `./teste/lolo'
removed `./teste/lulu'

Done:

% ls ./teste                                                                                      
lala