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

To delete hidden files, you have to specify:

rm -r images/* images/.*

With shells whose globs include . and .., 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 the -mindepth or -delete predicate, in which case, you could do:

find images/. ! -name . -prune -exec rm -rf {} +

Answer 3

To delete all files and directories(including the hidden ones) in a directory, you can try the following:

• use ls -Ab to match all files/directories

  cd dir_name && rm -rf `ls -Ab`
  

• use find to match all files/directories

  find dir_name -mindepth 1 -delete
  

  or, if your find doesn't support -delete:

  find dir_name -mindepth 1 -exec rm -rf {}
  

• delete the folder, then recreate it

  rm -rf dir_name && mkdir dir_name
  

• in bash,

  shopt -s dotglob  
  rm -rf dir_name/*
  

Answer 4

To delete all regular files recursively inside a directory, this command (assuming GNU or FreeBSD find) is good enough:

find . -type f -delete

That leaves all the non-regular files like symlinks (whether they point to regular files or not), directories, fifos, sockets, devices...

See also:

find . ! -type d -delete

to delete files of any type except directory.

Answer 5

Try this version:

 rm -r test/*

Answer 6

The question was to empty a directory = remove contents of a directory including hidden files, but not the directory itself. The find command with -mindepth 1 is actually the correct way to go, but to avoid error messages it must be joined with -maxdepth 1:

find /path/to/dir -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec rm -rf '{}' \;

Answer 7

I am using find command here:

Step 1: Find all the files and delete them :

find /path/to/directory/ -type f -exec rm {} \;

Example:

find /home/user/Desktop/images/ -type f -exec rm {} \;

Step 2: Find all the sub-directories and delete them :

find /path/to/directory/ -type d -exec rm -R {} \;

Answer 8

Another option:

$ rm -rf /path/to/directory/{*,.*}

source: https://askubuntu.com/a/552834/56648

Answer 9

rm's syntax is:

rm [OPTION]... FILE...

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

rm -r sub_dir/

Answer 10

You can remove directory using following command:

sudo rm -r directoryname1/2/3/*

It will be delete entire directory after 3/*.

Example sudo rm -r Downloads/song/*

It will be delete all files which are within Downloads/song.

Answer 11

This works perfectly for me, tested several variations worked every time.

From the directory that holds the images directory.

rm -frd ./images/*

before:

images/
    |_ header.png
    |_ footer.png
    |_ subdir/

after:

images/

Answer 12

To delete all files and subdirectories in the current directory, including hidden ones, without error message:

rm -rf .[^.] .??* *

Or, from the parent directory:

rm -rf images/.[^.] images/.??* images/*

From https://serverfault.com/a/47940/269538.

Answer 13

Delete the folder "test" and all the files inside:

 rm -r test

Delete all the files inside but keep the folder "test":

 rm -r test/*

Answer 14

cd into the folder then execute the following command:

ls |xargs rm -rf