Linux delete all directories in directory что это

Linux / Unix: Find and Delete All Empty Directories & Files

H ow do I find out all empty files and directories on a Linux / Apple OS X / BSD / Unix-like operating systems and delete them in a single pass?

You need to use the combination of find and rm command. [donotprint]

Tutorial details
Difficulty level	Easy
Root privileges	No
Requirements	find command
Est. reading time	5m

[/donotprint]GNU/find has an option to delete files with -delete option. Please note that Unix / Linux filenames can contain blanks and newlines, this default behaviour is often problematic; filenames containing blanks and/or newlines are incorrectly processed by many utilities including rm command. To avoid problems you need to pass the -print0 option to find command and pass the -0 option to xargs command, which prevents such problems.

Method # 1: Find and delete everything with find command only

The syntax is as follows to find and delete all empty directories using BSD or GNU find command:

Find and delete all empty files:

Delete empty directories

In this example, delete empty directories from

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Delete empty files

In this example, delete empty files from

Fig.01: Delete empty directories and files.

How to count all empty files or directories?

The syntax is as follows:

• -empty : Only find empty files and make sure it is a regular file or a directory.
• -type d : Only match directories.
• -type f : Only match files.
• -delete : Delete files. Always put -delete option at the end of find command as find command line is evaluated as an expression, so putting -delete first will make find try to delete everything below the starting points you specified.

This is useful when you need to clean up empty directories and files in a single command.

Method # 2: Find and delete everything using xargs and rm/rmdir command

The syntax is as follows to find and delete all empty directories using xargs command:

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How to remove files and directories quickly via terminal (bash shell) [closed]

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it’s on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed 6 years ago .

From terminal window:

When I use the rm command it can only remove files.
When I use the rmdir command it only removes empty folders.

If I have a directory nested with files and folders within folders with files and so on, is there any way to delete all the files and folders without all the strenuous command typing?

If it makes a difference, I am using the mac bash shell from terminal, not Microsoft DOS or linux.

4 Answers 4

-r «recursive» -f «force» (suppress confirmation messages)

Would remove everything (folders & files) in the current directory.

But be careful! Only execute this command if you are absolutely sure, that you are in the right directory.

Yes, there is. The -r option tells rm to be recursive, and remove the entire file hierarchy rooted at its arguments; in other words, if given a directory, it will remove all of its contents and then perform what is effectively an rmdir .

The other two options you should know are -i and -f . -i stands for interactive; it makes rm prompt you before deleting each and every file. -f stands for force; it goes ahead and deletes everything without asking. -i is safer, but -f is faster; only use it if you’re absolutely sure you’re deleting the right thing. You can specify these with -r or not; it’s an independent setting.

And as usual, you can combine switches: rm -r -i is just rm -ri , and rm -r -f is rm -rf .

Also note that what you’re learning applies to bash on every Unix OS: OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. In fact, rm ‘s syntax is the same in pretty much every shell on every Unix OS. OS X, under the hood, is really a BSD Unix system.

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How do I remove all sub-directories from within a directory?

This question is kind of a phase II to the first question I posted at here

I have a directory that contains a bunch of sub-directories, .zip files, and other random files not contained within a sub-directory.

I’d like a command line script to remove all sub-directories from within the parent directory, but keep all zip files and loose files that don’t belong to any sub-directories. All of the sub-directories have content, so I believe I’d need to force their deletion with the -f command.

So basically, a command that looks inside the parent directory (or the current directory), deletes all folders from within it, but keeps all other content and files that are not a folder or contained within a folder.

I understand that deleting items from the command line requires special care, but I have already taken all necessary precautions to back up remotely.

6 Answers 6

In BASH you can use the trailing slash (I think it should work in any POSIX shell):

Note the — which separates options from arguments and allows one to remove entries starting with a hyphen — otherwise after expansion by the shell the entry name would be interpreted as an option by rm (the same holds for many other command line utilities).

Add the -f option if you don’t want to be prompted for confirmation when deleting non-writeable files.

Note that by default, hidden directories (those whose name starts with . ) will be left alone.

An important caveat: the expansion of */ will also include symlinks that eventually resolve to files of type directory. And depending on the rm implementation, rm -R — thelink/ will either just delete the symlink, or (in most of them) delete the content of the linked directory recursively but not that directory itself nor the symlink.

If using zsh , a better approach would be to use a glob qualifier to select files of type directory only:

to include symlinks to directories (but because, this time, the expansion doesn’t have trailing / s, it’s the symlink only that is removed with all rm implementations).

With bash , AT&T ksh , yash or zsh you can do:

to strip the trailing / .

In addition to the wildcard way, you can also use find (at least GNU find) to do this:

As with other find lines, you can run the first part ( find -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d ) to see a list of directories that will be removed.

Portably (POSIXly), you’d use the -exec cmd <> + syntax instead of -print0 | xargs -r0 , and -prune do limit the depth:

(and remove the echo to actually do it).

A safer option (here also assuming GNU mv ) is to do something like this:

any of which will move all the stuff into ../to-rm instead of deleting it. You can verify it did what you wanted, them rm -Rf that directory at your leisure.

You might want to create a script for some of these suggestions, especially rm -R — */ , and keep it in your /usr/local/bin folder; or create an alias in your

/.bashrc file. Since it’s so easy to mistype a command and break your system — even a single letter and/or the order of letters can result in catastrophic consequences — this would serve as a somewhat more robust solution than having to type the different options and arguments each time you want to accomplish this task.

Also, you may want to include the -i or —interactive=once or -I or —interactive=always option to your script/command which will serve as another tool to avoid the unintended deletions.

Furthermore, something like derobert suggested would be best; just copy/paste the script into a file/terminal-editor and adjust it to your specific needs, and the files/directories will be moved into a single directory (the contents of which you can check/verify) that you can simply remove by issuing the rm -rf command.

Another option is to use a GUI-application, such as your file manager, and simply select all applicable files/folders you want to delete. Check your distribution’s manual-pages if you don’t have permissions.

Finally, if the folders are empty — essentially simple filenames — you can use the rmdir command to delete them. It doesn’t work for everything you may want to delete, but it will come in handy at times when you want to do some «house-cleaning». **You may want try the -p —ignore-fail-on-non-empty option, which will allow you to delete certain sub-directories as well as their empty «parents»—the directories in which they reside.

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