How Do I Remove Keys?

I want to remove keys that match "user*".

How do I do that in redis command line?

1

9 Answers

Another compact one-liner I use to do what you want is:

redis-cli KEYS "user*" | xargs redis-cli DEL
5

This is not a feature right now to be able to do in one shot (see the comments in the DEL documentation). Unfortunately, you are only left with using KEYS, looping through the results, and then using DEL to remove each one.

How about using bash a bit to help?

for key in `echo 'KEYS user*' | redis-cli | awk '{print $1}'`
 do echo DEL $key
done | redis-cli

To step through it:

  1. echo 'KEYS user*' | redis-cli | awk '{print $1}' -- get all the keys and strip out the extra text you don't want with awk.
  2. echo DEL $key -- for each one, create an echo statement to remove it.
  3. | redis-cli -- take the DEL statements and pass them back into the cli.

Not suggesting this is the best approach (you might have some issues if some of your usernames have spaces in them, but hopefully you get the point).

0

Now there is a command to remove a key,i.e., DEL key [keys]

DEL key...

Using awk, find all matching keys from redis using redis-cli KEYS command and pipe to redis-cli DEL command.

redis-cli KEYS "user*"  | awk '{ system("redis-cli DEL " $1) }'

Further to orangeoctopus' answer, you don't need the echo and pipe, you can pass commands as arguments into redis-cli. This means you can do

for key in `redis-cli "KEYS" "user*" | awk '{print $1}'`
 do redis-cli "DEL" "$key"
done

In order to delete all the redis keys of db 3:

redis-cli -n 3 --scan | xargs redis-cli -n 3 DEL

Use this to remove redis keys having backslashes, quotes, double quotes or spaces:

redis-cli KEYS "user*" | sed 's/\\/\\\\/g' | sed 's/"/\\"/g' | sed "s/'/\\\\'/g" | sed 's/ /\\ /g' | xargs redis-cli DEL

I know this is old, but for those of you coming here form Google:

I just published a command line interface utility to npm and github that allows you to delete keys that match a given pattern (even , or as you asked user) from a Redis database.

You can find the utility here:

When using the oneliner, you can edit the pattern in case it escapes specific characters. For instance, to delete patterns like '\b test \b' use:

redis-cli --raw KEYS '\\b*' | sed 's/\\b/\\\\b/g' | xargs redis-cli del

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Alexander Ross

Alexander Ross

Gaming, Esports & Interactive Media Writer

Alexander Ross has covered the video game industry for a decade, writing deep dives on game design, esports tournaments, VR developments, and gaming culture.

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