Keeping named files in bash

It just took me way too long to solve this, so I’m going to write it up quickly:

The Problem

• I have a file containing the basenames of spreadsheets that I want to keep in a directory structure. I want to delete all the other spreadsheets.
• There are levels of nested directories and the files are distributed among them
• The file names, and the directory names contain spaces (don’t look at me like that, it’s other people’s work on Windoze — at least I’m using bash
• I’m using bash on Linux, so I have proper find, etc.

A Solution

#!/bin/bash
modelfiles=../files-to-keep.txt

find . -name \*.xls\?  | while read  f
do
    if ! grep -q "${f##*/}" $modelfiles
    then
        rm "$f"
    fi
done

I’m sure there are more efficient ways. Contact me if you have ideas. Meanwhile I’ve got to get back to work so I’m sticking with “it works”.

UPDATE: that didn’t work when I tried to re-run it just now. So switched from grep -v to if ! …