I demand 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 piece of cake way to do this?

asked January 8, 2013 at 12:17

2

What I do in those cases is to type

                  rm *

So I press Ctrl+Ten,* to expand * into all visible file names.

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

answered Jan 8, 2013 at 12:18

nine

To rm all only u,p in bash just blazon:

                  rm !(u|p)

This requires the following choice to exist set:

                  shopt -s extglob

Meet more: glob - Greg's Wiki

slhck

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answered Jan viii, 2013 at 12:34

3

You can employ find 

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

You can so tune the conditions looking at the man folio of find

Update

  • Keep in listen that the order of the elements of the expressions is significant (encounter the documentation)

  • Examination your command start past using -print instead of -delete 

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

answered Jan eight, 2013 at 12:35

6

Simple:

mv the files you desire in a upper directory, rm the directory and so mv them back.

answered Jan eight, 2013 at 12:22

5

Somewhat similar to this answer but no special options are needed, as far every bit I know the post-obit is "ancient" functionality supported past whatsoever (vaguely) /bin/sh resembling shell (e.one thousand. bash, zsh, ksh, etc)

                  rm [^upwards]

answered Jan eight, 2013 at fourteen:22

iv

Doing information technology without find:

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

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

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

answered January 9, 2013 at three:54

half dozen

In zsh:

                setopt extended_glob  # probably in your .zshrc

then

                rm ^(u|p)

or 

                rm *~(u|p)

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

answered January 9, 2013 at 22:34

GLOBIGNORE takes a colon-separated list

                  GLOBIGNORE=u:p rm *

answered Jan 8, 2013 at 16:32

i

Dorsum in the floppy era I had a dos executable called "Except" that would motion 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 beat out script and if this is the kind of thing y'all are likely to do more than than twice it seems like it would be a good idea.

answered Jan eight, 2013 at 17:02

ane 

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

This will delete all files except u and p in unix

James Mertz

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answered Jan 8, 2013 at 17:58

For those preferring to specify capricious complex exclude patterns (spanning all affected filenames) in a full blown regexp emacs, posix-awk or posix-extended style (encounter 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

answered Jan 8, 2013 at 18:16

5

Yet another:

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

It'south kind of lengthy and I don't know if you could hands make it into an part that could hands accommodate and arbitrary number of arguments, merely information technology works well.

And it'south pure bash goodness.

answered Sep 24, 2014 at 3:05

I e'er use:

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

This will allow you to ascertain how granular you want to make it. And so if you want to delete a through o and Z files you tin can use:

                rm [a-o,z]*

answered Jan nine, 2013 at 20:54

Yet another version using xargs:

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

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

answered April 1, 2013 at 12:44

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, 2014 at 12:37

Use:

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

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

answered Sep 11, 2016 at 2:33

A simple manner that is hard to mess up: permit'south say you desire to delete everything except *.pdf:

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

answered Oct 22, 2013 at 7:06

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