Ignore 'cannot remove `dir`: Is a directory message

Question

I'm setting up an automation process where I am deleting files in a directory which contains sub-directories. I only want to delete the files in the directory, and want to keep the sub-directories intact. So right now I am just using rm * to delete the files in that directory. However, this command throws the message: cannt remove 'dir': Is a directory. I know I'm being knit-picky, but I don't want that message to repeatedly appear in my logs. Is there a better command I can use for deletion or a way that I can tell rm to ignore the sub-directories?

Answer 1

You can just throw away the error messages:

rm * 2>/dev/null

That'll throw away all errors. If you want to see other potential errors then we can do something more complicated:

rm * 2>&1 | grep -v 'cannot remove .*: Is a directory'

In this way other errors will still be logged.

Answer 2

Here you are:

find ./ -type f -exec rm -f * {} \; 2> /dev/null

If you want to keep even files in your subdirectories intact:

rm -f * 2> /dev/null

Answer 3

In zsh:

rm *(^/)

Other shells have no equivalent to zsh's glob qualifiers. Instead you can call find, which is capable of discriminating files by type, and tell it not to recurse into subdirectories other than . (the starting directory).

find . -name . -o -type d -prune -o rm -f {} +

This deletes dot files, whereas * doesn't match dot files. If you want to preserve dot files, tell find not to call rm on them.

find . -name . -o -type d -prune -o ! -name '.*' rm -f {} +

(You can use -mindepth, -maxdepth and -delete, but only if you don't need your script to run on systems where find doesn't have these options. The options I used are portable.)