Delete files with string found in file - linux cli

Question

I am trying to delete erroneous emails based on finding the email address in the file via Linux CLI.

I can get the files with

find . | xargs grep -l [e-mail]

But I cannot figure out how to delete them from there as the following code doesn't work.

rm -f | xargs find . | xargs grep -l [e-mail]

Thank you for your assistance.

Answer 1

You can use find's -exec and -delete, it will only delete the file if the grep command succeeds. Using grep -q so it wouldn't print anything, you can replace the -q with -l to see which files had the string in them.

find . -exec grep -q '[e-mail]' '{}' \; -delete