How to delete all files in a directory except some?

Question

I need to delete all files in a directory, but exclude some of them. For example, in a directory with the files a b c ... z, I need to delete all except for u and p. Is there an easy way to do this?

score 145 · Answer 1 · edited Jan 08 '13 at 13:07

145

To rm all but u,p in bash just type:

rm !(u|p)

This requires the following option to be set:

shopt -s extglob

See more: glob - Greg's Wiki

edited Jan 08 '13 at 13:07

slhck

235,242

answered Jan 08 '13 at 12:34

sparkie

2,268

score 113 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 08 '13 at 12:18

113

What I do in those cases is to type

rm *

Then I press Ctrl+X,* to expand * into all visible file names.

Then I can just remove the two files I like to keep from the list and finally execute the command line.

answered Jan 08 '13 at 12:18

Oliver Salzburg

89,072
65
269
311

score 86 · Answer 3 · edited Feb 12 '14 at 14:25

You can use find

find . ! -name u ! -name p -maxdepth 1 -type f -delete

! negates the next expression
-name specifies a filename
-maxdepth 1 will make find process the specified directory only (find by default traverses directories)
-type f will process only files (and not for example directories)
-delete will delete the files

You can then tune the conditions looking at the man page of find

Update

Keep in mind that the order of the elements of the expressions is significant (see the documentation)

Test your command first by using -print instead of -delete

find . ! -name u ! -name p -maxdepth 1 -type f -print

user176581 · Answer 4 · 2013-01-09T03:48:40.113

44

Simple:

mv the files you want in a upper directory, rm the directory and then mv them back.

edited Jan 09 '13 at 03:48

answered Jan 08 '13 at 12:22

user176581

617

score 17 · Answer 5 · edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:16

17

Somewhat similar to this answer but no special options are needed, as far as I know the following is "ancient" functionality supported by any (vaguely) /bin/sh resembling shell (e.g. bash, zsh, ksh, etc)

rm [^up]

edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:16

Community

1

answered Jan 08 '13 at 14:22

hlovdal

3,168

score 15 · Answer 6 · edited Jan 10 '13 at 20:23

15

Doing it without find:

ls | grep -v '(u|p)' | xargs rm

(Edit: "u" and "v", as in other places here, are being used as generic versions of entire regexes. Obviously you'll want to be careful to anchor your regexes to avoid matching too many things.)

You're definitely going to want a script if you're going to be doing much of this, as others have suggested.

edited Jan 10 '13 at 20:23

Community

1

answered Jan 09 '13 at 03:54

tquid

277

score 7 · Answer 7 · answered Jan 09 '13 at 22:34

7

In zsh:

setopt extended_glob  # probably in your .zshrc

then

rm ^(u|p)

or

rm *~(u|p)

The second will work even if you have ^ in $histchars for history substitution, and of course you can put an arbitrary glob before the ~.

answered Jan 09 '13 at 22:34

poolie

193

score 5 · Answer 8 · answered Jan 08 '13 at 16:32

5

GLOBIGNORE takes a colon-separated list

GLOBIGNORE=u:p
rm *

answered Jan 08 '13 at 16:32

W_Whalley

3,522
1
21
18

score 3 · Answer 9 · answered Sep 11 '16 at 02:33

3

Use:

find . -type f ! -name 'u' ! -name 'p' ! -name '*.ext' -delete
find . -type d ! -name 'u' ! -name 'p' ! -name '*.ext' -delete

in order to delete all files including directories, except u, p and .ext files.

answered Sep 11 '16 at 02:33

Renzo Fabián

31

score 3 · Answer 10 · answered Jan 08 '13 at 17:02

Back in the floppy era I had a dos executable called "Except" that would move things out of the current directory temporarially and execute a command, so you could say:

except *.txt del *.*

to delete everything but your text files.

This would be a pretty trivial thing to implement as a shell script and if this is the kind of thing you are likely to do more than twice it seems like it would be a good idea.

score 3 · Answer 11 · edited Jan 08 '13 at 18:00

3

 find . -maxdepth 1 ! -name "u" ! -name "p" -type f -exec rm -rf {} \;

This will delete all files except u and p in unix

edited Jan 08 '13 at 18:00

James Mertz

26,529

answered Jan 08 '13 at 17:58

user1803687

131

score 2 · Answer 12 · edited Jan 09 '13 at 03:57

2

For those preferring to specify arbitrary complex exclude patterns (spanning all affected filenames) in a full blown regexp emacs, posix-awk or posix-extended style (see find man page) I would recommend this one. It excludes u and p in current dir in this example. This may be handy for scripts.

find -regextype posix-awk ! -regex './(u|p)' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

edited Jan 09 '13 at 03:57

aidan

103

answered Jan 08 '13 at 18:16

sparkie

2,268

score 2 · Answer 13 · answered Sep 24 '14 at 03:05

Yet another:

for FILE in ./*; do if [[ $FILE != ./u* ]] || [[ $FILE != ./p* ]];then rm $FILE; fi; done;

It's kind of lengthy and I don't know if you could easily make it into an function that could easily accommodate and arbitrary number of arguments, but it works well.

And it's pure bash goodness.

score 2 · Answer 14 · answered Oct 22 '14 at 12:37

2

Here's another variant. You can type:

rm -i *

or:

rm --interactive *

So rm will ask you to confirm deleting of each file.

answered Oct 22 '14 at 12:37

idzikovsky

21

score 1 · Answer 15 · answered Jan 09 '13 at 20:54

1

I always use:

rm [a-o,q-t,v-z]*

This will allow you to define how granular you want to make it. So if you want to delete a through o and Z files you can use:

rm [a-o,z]*

answered Jan 09 '13 at 20:54

J Baron

920

score 1 · Answer 16 · answered Apr 01 '13 at 12:44

1

Yet another version using xargs:

ls -1 | grep -v do_not_delete | xargs -I files rm "files"

Note that xargs -I is needed to handle filenames including spaces correctly.

answered Apr 01 '13 at 12:44

sebhofer

111

score 1 · Answer 17 · answered Oct 22 '13 at 07:06

1

A simple way that is hard to mess up: let's say you want to delete everything except *.pdf:

mkdir tmp
mv *.pdf tmp
rm *
mv tmp/* .
rm -r tmp

answered Oct 22 '13 at 07:06

talloaktrees

121

How to delete all files in a directory except some?

17 Answers17

Linked

Related