Sometimes you run into the problem, that you have a host which had a template attached but somebody wanted to replace the template or something like that and unfortunately hit just “Unlink” instead of “Unlink and Clear” and all the items are still in the host.

If you have only one host it’s normaly no problem to delete all items per hand, but if you have multiple of those hosts it’s quite some work do remove the old items.

Solution nr. one would be tu use the filters to select all items in a specified host group and delte those items, but the applications, discovery rules and so on will still remain in the hosts and have to be deleted in a 2nd/3rd step.

See the Screenshot below:

My preferred solution for this problem is a simple regex based find/replace with Notepad++.
Herefor an export of the affected hosts is needed. The xml-file could be opend with NPP and the following regexes are needed for find/replace (CTRL+H) to remove the unwanted items.

[pastacode lang=”markdown” manual=”Find%20what%3A%20(%3Cdiscovery_rules%3E%5B%5Cs%5CS%5D*%3F%3C%5C%2Fdiscovery_rules%3E)%7C(%3Ctriggers%3E%5B%5Cs%5CS%5D*%3F%3C%5C%2Ftriggers%3E)%7C(%3Cinventory%3E%5B%5Cs%5CS%5D*%3F%3C%5C%2Finventory%3E)%7C(%3Citems%3E%5B%5Cs%5CS%5D*%3F%3C%5C%2Fitems%3E)%0A%0AReplace%20with%3A%20(%3F1%3Cdiscovery_rules%20%2F%3E)(%3F2%3Ctriggers%20%2F%3E)(%3F3%3Cinventory%20%2F%3E)(%3F4%3Citems%20%2F%3E)” message=”” highlight=”” provider=”manual”/]

In the above example multiple regexes with multiple replace-patterns are used to replace the items, discovery rules, triggers an inventory and reset it.