15

I routinely use bind mounts to aid in making space available in multiple locations without having to have multiple logical volumes / physical partitions / LUNs, etc.

For example, I may have a 200G LV mounted at /space. From there, I will make subdirectories like var_opt and var_log which I can then bind mount to /var/opt and /var/log, respectively.

When doing a cleanup on the 'space' directory, is it possible to exclude directories from an rm -rf running inside /space?

Example:

# pwd
/space
# rm -rf * {except-for-var_opt-and-var_log}

Is there a different or better (but similarly simple) way to accomplish what I'm trying to do that I haven't thought of?

warren
  • 10,322

5 Answers5

19

Simple conceptually, and has a low risk of error:

mkdir TO_DELETE
mv * TO_DELETE
mv TO_DELETE/var_opt TO_DELETE/var_log .
rm -rf TO_DELETE

Ignore the error from mv about moving TO_DELETE to a subdirectory of itself.

You can also use ksh's extended globs:

rm -rf !(var_opt|var_log)

These are also available in bash if you enable them:

shopt -s extglob
rm -rf !(var_opt|var_log)

Ditto in zsh:

setopt ksh_glob
rm -rf !(var_opt|var_log)

Zsh also has its own extended globs:

setopt extended_glob
rm -rf ^var_(opt|log)
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
  • 72,151
3

Another option:

Check the output of

env ls -d -1 space/* | grep -E -v 'var_opt|var_log'

If that looks like the list of files/folders you want to delete, use

env ls -d -1 space/* | grep -E -v 'var_opt|var_log' | xargs rm -rf

I suggest use of env ls instead of ls to disable any aliasing of ls in your shell.

R Sahu
  • 236
3

Maybe with find + xargs + rm combination?

find /space ! -iregex '(var_opt|var_log)' | xargs rm -f

or something in that tune. Of course, it might be wise to first instruct xargs execute something more harmless, such as echo, before changing it to rm ...

Janne Pikkarainen
  • 8,015
2

If your input file names are generated by users, you need to deal with surprising file names containing space, ', or " in the filename.

The use of xargs can lead to nasty surprises because of the separator problem.

GNU Parallel does not have that problem.

find /space ! -iregex '(var_opt|var_log)' | parallel -X rm -f

Watch the intro video for GNU Parallel to learn more.

Anthony Geoghegan
  • 3,981
Ole Tange
  • 446
1

If the directories you want to preserve are exactly the mountpoints, you might be able to use --one-file-system in GNU rm.

I haven't investigated how this is implemented, but I'm guessing that this won't do what you want if the bind mount is from within the same filesystem, so be careful! rm doesn't have a --no-act option, but you can pipe yes no | rm -ir . for example.

Toby Speight
  • 5,213