How to delete files that are not open?

Question

Assume that there are three files in a directory of my Ubuntu-Linux. One of them is open in a music player, but two others are not open in any application and are not in use of any Process.

I want to delete those two files. In the other words, I want to detect files that are not used by any process, and then delete them.

I tried this:

rm !(lsof | grep "thePath")

but it failed. There are a problem with lsof here.

Is there any way?

Answer 1

Your syntax is wildly wrong. In the shell, unlike in many other programming languages, putting a command (as if it were a function call) in parentheses does not produce its result.

Instead, you want something like this:

for f in *; do
    fuser -s "$f" || rm "$f"
done

I preferred fuser over lsof as it allows you to query an individual file.