How to remove only the content of directories?

Question

I'm in a folder: /var/myfolder.

Inside there are some other folders like: /var/myfolder/A/ /var/myfolder/B/ `/var/myfolder/C/ etc.

Inside each there are some files with random names. How do I remove all the files from all the folders inside /var/myfolder?

The structure (all the directories, eg., A, B, C etc., inside /var/myfolder) should remain intact.

Answer 1

Try:

find /var/myfolder -type f -delete

This gets all the regular files under /var/myfolder and deletes them leaving only the directories.

Answer 2

With zsh, use the . glob qualifier to match only regular files:

rm -- **/*(.)

This deletes all the (non-hidden) regular files in the current directory and its subdirectories recursively. Add the D glob qualifier to delete hidden regular files (and regular files in hidden directories) as well.

Answer 3

You can run rm */* in /var/myfolder

Answer 4

find . -depth -exec rm {} + 2>/dev/null

rm doesn't remove directories - so just run it on everything.

To preserve symlinks to directories:

find .  ! -type d -exec sh -c '
    for f do [ -d  "$f" ] || 
          set "$@" "$f";  shift
    done; rm  "$@"' sh  {} +

And I think this should also work in, perhaps, a slightly optimized way if there are a lot of files which might need testing in the above version:

find . ! \( -type l -o -type d \)  \
-exec  rm {} + -o -exec  sh -c '
       for f do [ -d "$f" ] ||
       unlink "$f";done' sh {} +

Answer 5

rm var/myfolder/*/*

The will delete everything inside the sub folders without touching the sub folders themselves.

The first * is for the subdirectories of myfolder itself (A, B, ...). The second * is for the files in A, B, etc.

IF there are more folders inside A, B, etc. First run: rm /var/myfolder/*/*/* then run rm /var/myfolder/*/*.

Answer 6

# This will delete all directory contents, including hidden files and
# subdirectories, without deleting the directory itself
# mindepth should be two if executed from the current directory
# This does not delete files in the directory, only in subfolders


# With GNU find:
find /path/to/directoryToEmpty -mindepth 1 -delete

# OpenBSD (and probably other BSDs)
find /path/to/directoryToEmpty -mindepth 1 -depth -exec rm -f {} \;

# To see what it deletes, in the order it will delete it:
find /path/to/directoryToEmpty -mindepth 1 -depth -print

Answer 7

You should also be able to cd to the top of the directory tree in question, then run:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

and that should delete all the files while leaving the directory tree intact. The -print0 and -0 options may be omitted if you are confident you do not have any file or directory names that contain spaces.

The find command distinguishes between files ( -type f) and links ( -type l) so this should leave links intact, if any. Not tested though. If in doubt, run:

find . -type l

and see if anything shows up before you run the earlier find command.

Answer 8

Simply use below command:

sudo rm -rf directory_in_which_you_have_content/*

---------------- OR --------------------------------------------------------

The '*' is stands for all so when you will use * that will delete all the content. so Either use command like this or go to the directory in which you want to delete all the content and just use below command:

sudo rm -rf *