Use xmlstarlet to remove an entire element that matches an attribute value?

My question is similar to [sed - Delete XML node containing certain element - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/72157/delete-xml-node-containing-certain-element) . Trying to implement the suggestions there has kept me busy all day, but I haven't managed to get anything to work, so I am posting a question. Within a bash script, I need to remove an entire ` element when the id attribute matches a given value. I'm actually using user-groups to do part of this. Say a user is **not** in the group folder_a; then the entire element with attribute id=".Folder_A"` should be deleted from config.xml. (I also delete the folder from disk.) My bash script looks like this: #!/bin/bash grouplist=$(groups $theuser); for foldername in '.Folder_A' '.Folder_B'; do grpnm="${foldername,,}"|sed -e 's/^.//' if ! [[ $grouplist =~ ${grpnm} ]]; then perl -0777 -pe "s|()|$1=~ /id=\"$foldername\"/?"":$1|gse" config.xml > config.xml rm -fr "$foldername" else echo "permitting access to ${foldername}" fi done The perl command is **not** working. It is just one of many variants I have tried. I also tried sed. I would prefer to use xmlstarlet, but I had even more trouble with it. **Edit** - I just found this answer: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/339089/393289 It helped me come up with this: xml ed -d '//configuration/folder[contains(@id,".Folder_A")]' config.xml I feel like I am closer now. (I tried to upvote that answer but I don't have enough rep yet.) However, I can't translate the attribute name into a bash variable yet due to the quote marks or something else. BTW, how do I make that perform an in-place edit (similar to the sed -i command) once I get it working? Here's an example config.xml file: basic 0 0 0 false false false 25 .stfolder basic 0 0 0 false false false 25 .stfolder false true 0 0 0 false false true 0 0 0 false 127.0.0.1:8384 98qewr0qe9r default 0 0 60 false 10 false -1 3 false 1800 true false 24 false 5 false false 10 0 ~/Sync/ 0 false auto 0 false false This is a config.xml example for syncthing.