Linux delete all files in current directory

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:

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How to remove all files from a directory?

The closest I’ve gotten is

but that doesn’t work for files that don’t have an extension.

9 Answers 9

Linux does not use extensions. It is up to the creator of the file to decide whether the name should have an extension. Linux looks at the first few bytes to figure out what kind of file it is dealing with.

To remove all non-hidden files* in a directory use:

However, this will show an error for each sub-directory, because in this mode it is only allowed to delete files.

To remove all non-hidden files and sub-directories (along with all of their contents) in a directory use:

* Hidden files and directories are those whose names start with . (dot) character, e.g.: .hidden-file or .hidden-directory/ . Note that, in Bash, if the dotglob option (which is off by default) is set, rm will act on hidden files too, because they will be included when * is expanded by the shell to provide the list of filename arguments.

To remove a folder with all its contents (including all interior folders):

To remove all the contents of the folder (including all interior folders) but not the folder itself:

or, if you want to make sure that hidden files/directories are also removed:

To remove all the «files» from inside a folder(not removing interior folders):

Warning: if you have spaces in your path, make sure to always use quotes.

is equivalent to 2 separate rm -rf calls:

To avoid this issue, you can use ‘ single-quotes ‘ (prevents all expansions, even of shell variables) or » double-quotes » (allows expansion of shell variables, but prevents other expansions):

• rm — stands for remove
• -f — stands for force which is helpful when you don’t want to be asked/prompted if you want to remove an archive, for example.
• -r — stands for recursive which means that you want to go recursively down every folder and remove everything.

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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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In Unix, how do you remove everything in the current directory and below it?

I know this will delete everything in a subdirectory and below it:

But how do you delete everything in the current directory as well as every subdirectory below it and the contents of all of those subdirectories?

10 Answers 10

Practice safe computing. Simply go up one level in the hierarchy and don’t use a wildcard expression:

The two dashes — tell rm that is not a command-line option, even when it begins with a dash.

Will delete all files/directories below the current one.

If you want to do the same with another directory whose name you have, you can just name that

If you want to remove not only the sub-directories and files of it, but also the directory itself, omit -mindepth 1 . Do it without the -delete to get a list of the things that will be removed.

What I always do is type

and then hit ESC-*, and bash will expand the * to an explicit list of files and directories in the current working directory.

The benefits are:

• I can review the list of files to delete before hitting ENTER.
• The command history will not contain «rm -rf *» with the wildcard intact, which might then be accidentally reused in the wrong place at the wrong time. Instead, the command history will have the actual file names in there.
• It has also become handy once or twice to answer «wait a second. which files did I just delete?». The file names are visible in the terminal scrollback buffer or the command history.

In fact, I like this so much that I’ve made it the default behavior for TAB with this line in .bashrc:

Update: The . stands for current directory, but we cannot use this. The command seems to have explicit checks for . and .. . Use the wildcard globbing instead. But this can be risky.

A safer version IMO is to use:

(this prompts you for confirmation before deleting every file/directory.)

It is correct that rm –rf . will remove everything in the current directly including any subdirectories and their content. The single dot ( . ) means the current directory. be carefull not to do rm -rf .. since the double dot ( .. ) means the previous directory.

This being said, if you are like me and have multiple terminal windows open at the same time, you’d better be safe and use rm -ir . Lets look at the command arguments to understand why.

First, if you look at the rm command man page ( man rm under most Unix) you notice that –r means «remove the contents of directories recursively». So, doing rm -r . alone would delete everything in the current directory and everything bellow it.

In rm –rf . the added -f means «ignore nonexistent files, never prompt». That command deletes all the files and directories in the current directory and never prompts you to confirm you really want to do that. -f is particularly dangerous if you run the command under a privilege user since you could delete the content of any directory without getting a chance to make sure that’s really what you want.

On the otherhand, in rm -ri . the -i that replaces the -f means «prompt before any removal». This means you’ll get a chance to say «oups! that’s not what I want» before rm goes happily delete all your files.

In my early sysadmin days I did an rm -rf / on a system while logged with full privileges (root). The result was two days passed a restoring the system from backups. That’s why I now employ rm -ri now.

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Linux / UNIX: How To Empty Directory

How To Empty Directory In Linux and Unix

1. rm command – Delete one or more files or directories.
2. find command – Find and delete all files from a specific directory.

Linux Empty Directory Using the rm Command

First, consider the following directory structure displayed using the tree command

To delete all files from /tmp/foo/ directory (i.e. empty /tmp/foo/ directory), enter:
$ cd /tmp/foo/
$ rm *
OR
$ rm /tmp/foo/*

Delete All Files Using the Find Command

Consider the following directory structure:

To delete all files from /tmp/bar/ directory (including all files from sub-directories such as /tmp/bar/dir1), enter:
$ cd /tmp/bar/
$ find . -type f -delete
OR
$ find /tmp/bar/ -type f -delete
The above find command will delete all files from /tmp/bar/ directory. It will not delete any sub-directories. To remove both files and directories, try:
find /path/to/target/dir/ -delete
The find commands options are as follows:

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• -type f : Delete on files only.
• -type d : Remove folders only.
• -delete : Delete all files from given directory name.

How to remove a full directory and all files in Linux

To remove a directory that contains other files or sub-directories, use the following rm command command. In the example, I am going to empty directory named “docs” using the rm -rf command as follows:
rm -rf /tmp/docs/*
Get verbose outputs:
rm -rfv /tmp/docs/*

The rm command options are as follows:

• -r : Delete directories and their contents recursively on Linux or Unix-like systems.
• -f : Forceful removal. In other words, ignore nonexistent files and delete whatever found.
• -v : Verbose outputs. For example, explain what is being done on screen.

Conclusion

You learned how to use the rm and find command to delete all files and sub-directories on Linux/macOS/*BSD and Unix-like systems. In other words, this is useful to empty folders on Linux. For more information see rm command help page here.

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