How to remove all the files in a directory?

Question

I am trying to remove all files and subdirectories in a directory. I used rm -r to remove all files, but I want to remove all files and subdirectories, excluding the top directory itself.

For example, I have a top directory like images. It contains the files header.png, footer.png and a subdirectory.

Now I want to delete header.png, footer.png and the subdirectory, but not images.

How can I do this in linux?

Answer 1

If your top-level directory is called images, then run rm -r images/*. This uses the shell glob operator * to run rm -r on every file or directory within images.

Answer 2

Try this version:

 rm -r test/*

Answer 3

To delete hidden files, you have to specify:

rm -r images/* images/.*

This will lead to an error like

rm: cannot remove `.' directory `images/.'
rm: cannot remove `..' directory `images/..'

but it will delete hidden files.

An approach without errormessage is, to use find/delete with mindepth. This is gnu-find.

find images -mindepth 1 -delete

Your find may lack a -delete switch.

Answer 4

rm's syntax is:

rm [OPTION]... FILE...

So, you have to state the appropriate path explicitly, e.g.

rm -r sub_dir/