How do I remove keys?

Question

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

How do I do that in redis command line?

Jitter

in redis you don't remove keys but keys remove themselves. – Lucent

Answer 1

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).

Chenoweth

Answer 2

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

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

Gerhan

This is great, thanks. It is sad that Redis doesn't have this functionality natively. – Hetman

If you have multible databases (keyspaces) then this is the trick: Lets say you need to delete keys in db3: redis-cli -n 3 KEYS "prefix:*" | xargs redis-cli -n 3 DEL – Gadroon

is there a one liner if you need to provide AUTH (i.e. login) prior to executing the delete command? – Atlanta

'redis-cli help' says: -a <password> Password to use when connecting to the server. Hope it helps. – Gerhan

I had problems with this one. In case you have many entries to delete is better to use the awk based ones below. – Byre

Getting this: (error) ERR wrong number of arguments for 'keys' command – Omland

Answer 3

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

DEL key...

Archivist

Answer 4

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

Rarefaction

Answer 5

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) }'

Ahvenanmaa

Answer 6

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

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

Meryl

Answer 7

If there are multiple keys in a pattern, for example : user1, user2, user3. To delete all keys which satisfy a pattern, use the below syntax.

redis-cli -c --scan --pattern '*user*' | xargs -l -r redis-cli -c del

With this command, it will scan and finds all the keys which matches the above pattern and passes this to xargs which deletes the keys one by one.

Note the use of -l arguments to delete keys one by one and -r to execute the delete command only if there is any input to the delete command.

Orthopedic

Answer 8

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

Esma

Answer 9

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:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/redis-utils-cli

Deforce

Answer 10

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

Yacketyyak

Answer 11

On Windows, simply type

DEL KEYS nameofyourkey

Baggs