Action Lists

Finding PII is only half the job. Once triage has confirmed which files genuinely contain sensitive data, something has to happen to them: stray exports get deleted, log files get scrubbed, old reports get cleaned up. Action lists are how PII Crawler turns scan results into that remediation step.

An action list is a named collection of files gathered from your scan results. You build the list as you review findings, then run one of two actions over the whole list at once:

• Delete removes the files from disk, permanently.
• Redact rewrites each file in place, replacing every confirmed PII value with mask characters of the same length. 123-45-6789 becomes ***-**-****, and the rest of the file is untouched.

Both actions show you a full preview of what will happen before you confirm anything.

Building a list

Open a scan and go to its Files view. Use the checkboxes to select files (Shift-click selects a range, and a selection can span pages), then choose Add to list in the selection bar. Pick an existing list, or type a name to create one on the spot.

Lists are global, not per scan. The same list can collect files from several scans, so you can sweep your whole estate into one remediation pass. The same file can only appear in a list once, so adding an overlapping selection is safe; duplicates are skipped and reported.

You will find all your lists under Action Lists in the sidebar.

Reviewing a list

The list page shows every entry with its file path, the scan it came from, how many live findings it has (findings you marked as false positives are not counted, and are never redacted), and its current status:

• redacted — a redact run rewrote this file; hover the badge to see how many findings were masked and when.
• error — the last run could not process this file; hover the badge for the exact error.
• file gone — the file no longer exists on disk. It will be skipped by any action.
• not a plain-text file — the file can be deleted, but not redacted (see below).

Entries can be removed from the list at any time with the checkboxes and Remove from list. Removing an entry never touches the file itself, and deleting a whole list only deletes the list.

If you delete a scan, its entries disappear from your lists too, since they reference that scan's results. Records of past runs are kept.

Deleting files

Click Delete files… on the list page. PII Crawler first shows a preview: how many files will be deleted, and which ones will be skipped and why (already gone from disk, located inside a zip archive, or from a network scan). Nothing has happened yet at this point.

To proceed, type DELETE into the confirmation box and click the button. The files are removed one by one, with live progress and a Stop button. When the run finishes you get a per-file report; any file that could not be deleted (for example due to permissions) is listed with the exact error.

A delete run also cleans up after itself: every file it confirms gone, whether it just deleted it or found it already missing, is removed from the list automatically. The list stays a to-do queue of files that still exist, and the run history below it keeps the permanent record of what was deleted and when.

Deletion is permanent. PII Crawler removes files with the operating system's normal delete, it does not move them to a trash folder. If you might need a file again, take a backup before running the action.

Redacting files

Redact files… works the same way: preview, type REDACT to confirm, progress, per-file results.

For each file, PII Crawler takes every finding that is not marked as a false positive and overwrites those exact characters with *, keeping punctuation so the shape of the value stays recognizable:

Before:  Customer SSN: 123-45-6789, contact: [email protected]
After:   Customer SSN: ***-**-****, contact: ****@*******.***

The file's length, encoding, and everything around the masked values are preserved. Files are rewritten atomically (a temporary file is written and then swapped in), so a crash or power loss mid-run never leaves a half-written file. File permissions are preserved.

A few safety rules apply:

• Plain-text files only. Text formats such as .txt, .csv, .log, .json, or source code can be masked precisely. PDFs, Office documents, images, and archives are skipped with a "not a plain-text file" status; redacting those formats in place is not currently supported.
• The content is verified first. Before masking, PII Crawler checks that the recorded finding still matches the bytes in the file. If the file changed since the scan, it searches for the known PII values and masks every occurrence it finds; if they are gone entirely, the file is skipped as "content changed since the scan" and left untouched.
• False positives survive. Anything you marked as a false positive during triage is left exactly as it was.

After redacting, re-scan the affected folders if you want fresh results; the old scan's findings still describe the file as it was before masking.

From the command line

The same lists and actions are available for scripting:

piicrawler lists create cleanup
piicrawler lists add --list 1 --scan 2 --file 10 11 12
piicrawler lists show 1
piicrawler lists run --list 1 --action redact --dry-run   # preview only
piicrawler lists run --list 1 --action delete --yes       # no prompt
piicrawler lists runs                                      # past runs
piicrawler lists run-show 3                                # one run's per-file outcomes

run without --yes asks for confirmation on a terminal and refuses in scripts, so an unattended pipeline can never delete files by accident. Every run, including dry runs, is recorded with per-file outcomes you can inspect later.

Limits

• Actions work on local scan results only. Files found by a network share scan can be reviewed but not deleted or redacted remotely.
• Files inside zip archives cannot be deleted or redacted individually; delete the archive itself if needed.
• One add operation can submit up to 50,000 files, and a list can hold up to 100,000 entries.
• Only one action can run per list at a time.