Linux delete all files from folder

Linux Delete All Files In Directory Using Command Line

Linux Delete All Files In Directory

The procedure to remove all files from a directory:

1. Open the terminal application
2. To delete everything in a directory run: rm /path/to/dir/*
3. To remove all sub-directories and files: rm -r /path/to/dir/*

Let us see some examples of rm command to delete all files in a directory when using Linux operating systems.

How to remove all the files in a directory?

Suppose you have a directory called /home/vivek/data/. To list files type the ls command:
$ ls

Understanding rm command option that deleted all files in a directory

• -r : Remove directories and their contents recursively.
• -f : Force option. In other words, ignore nonexistent files and arguments, never prompt. Dangerous option. Be careful.
• -v : Verbose option. Show what rm is doing on screen.

Deleting hidden vs non-hidden files

In Linux, any file or directory that starts with a dot character called a dot file. It is to be treated as hidden file. To see hidden files pass the -a to the ls command:
ls
ls -a
ls -la
To remove all files except hidden files in a directory use:
rm /path/to/dir/*
rm -rf /path/to/dir/*
rm *
In this example, delete all files including hidden files, run:
rm -rf /path/to/dir1/<*,.*>
rm -rfv /path/to/dir1/

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Bash remove all files from a directory including hidden files using the dotglob option

If the dotglob option set, bash includes filenames beginning with a ‘.’ in the results of pathname expansion. In other words, turn on this option to delete hidden files:

See GNU/bash man page for the shopt command online here:
man bash
help shopt

Linux Remove All Files In Directory

As I said earlier one can use the unlink command too. The syntax is:
unlink filename
For example, delete file named foo.txt in the current working directory, enter:
unlink foo.txt
It can only delete a single file at a time. You can not pass multiple files or use wildcards such as *. Therefore, I strongly recommend you use the rm command as discussed above.

Conclusion

In this quick tutorial, you learned how to remove or delete all the files in a directory using the rm command. Linux offers a few more options to find and delete files. Please see the following tutorials:

🐧 Get the latest tutorials on Linux, Open Source & DevOps via

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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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Remove only files in directory on linux NOT directories

What delete command can be run to remove only files in given directory

• NOT directories
• NOT sub-directories
• NOT files in these sub-directories.

Some files don’t have extensions so rm *.* wont work.

There are thousands of files in this folder.

10 Answers 10

BUT this won’t prompt you for confirmation or output what it just deleted. Therefore best to run it without the -delete action first and check that they’re the correct files.

You can use find with -type f for files only and -maxdepth 1 so find won’t search for files in sub-directories of /path/to/directory . rm -i will prompt you on each delete so you can confirm or deny the delete. If you dont care about being asked for confirmation of each delete, change it to rm -fv ( -f for force the delete). The -v flag makes it so that with each delete, a message is printed saying what file was just deleted.

This should meet the criteria:

NOT directories
NOT subdirectories
NOT files in these subdirectories.

Since this is high on google search, the simplest answer is:

where $directoryPath is the directory you want to empty. Credits should go to cbm3384 (that for some reason has gotten negative votes for this answer, why?)

If you do not want to confirm:

If you don’t believe try man rm or

The above creates a directory structure, that has ‘helloX.txt’ in each folder (X is the directory level). rm 1/2/* deletes hello2.txt and leaves the other structure intact.

Also rm */*/* deletes only hello2.txt . It is the only that matches the pattern.

Just an example of a Makefile that cleans cakephp tmp-directory and leaves the directory structure intact:

Minus in front of the rm means «do not halt on errors» (unremoved directory returns an error). If you want some level to be saved, just remove that line, e.g. second rm line removes logs.

Let me know if you have a system that does something else (BSD?).

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How can I recursively delete all files of a specific extension in the current directory?

How do I safely delete all files with a specific extension (e.g. .bak ) from current directory and all subfolders using one command-line? Simply, I’m afraid to use rm since I used it wrong once and now I need advice.

8 Answers 8

You don’t even need to use rm in this case if you are afraid. Use find :

But use it with precaution. Run first:

to see exactly which files you will remove.

Also, make sure that -delete is the last argument in your command. If you put it before the -name *.bak argument , it will delete everything.

See man find and man rm for more info and see also this related question on SE:

First run the command shopt -s globstar . You can run that on the command line, and it’ll have effect only in that shell window. You can put it in your .bashrc , and then all newly started shells will pick it up. The effect of that command is to make **/ match files in the current directory and its subdirectories recursively (by default, **/ means the same thing as */ : only in the immediate subdirectories). Then:

(or gvfs-trash **/*.bak or what have you).

Deleting files is for me not something you should use rm for. Here is an alternative:

As Flimm states in the comments:

The package trash-cli does the same thing as gvfs-trash without the dependency on gvfs.

You don’t need to make an alias for this, because the trash-cli package provides a command trash , which does what we want.

As Eliah Kagan makes clear in extensive comments, you can also make this recursive using find . In that case you can’t use an alias, so the commands below assume you have installed trash-cli . I summarise Eliah’s comments:

This command finds and displays all .bak files and symlinks anywhere in the current directory or its subdirectories or below.

To delete them, append an -exec with the trash command:

-xtype f selects files and symlinks to files, but not folders. To delete .bak folders too, remove that part, and use -execdir , which avoids cannot trash non-existent errors for .bak files inside .bak directories:

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Remove all files except some from a directory

When using sudo rm -r , how can I delete all files, with the exception of the following:

19 Answers 19

If you don’t specify -type f find will also list directories, which you may not want.

Or a more general solution using the very useful combination find | xargs :

for example, delete all non txt-files in the current directory:

The print0 and -0 combination is needed if there are spaces in any of the filenames that should be deleted.

The extglob (Extended Pattern Matching) needs to be enabled in BASH (if it’s not enabled):

find . | grep -v «excluded files criteria» | xargs rm

This will list all files in current directory, then list all those that don’t match your criteria (beware of it matching directory names) and then remove them.

Update: based on your edit, if you really want to delete everything from current directory except files you listed, this can be used:

It will create a backup directory /tmp_backup (you’ve got root privileges, right?), move files you listed to that directory, delete recursively everything in current directory (you know that you’re in the right directory, do you?), move back to current directory everything from /tmp_backup and finally, delete /tmp_backup .

I choose the backup directory to be in root, because if you’re trying to delete everything recursively from root, your system will have big problems.

Surely there are more elegant ways to do this, but this one is pretty straightforward.

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