Delete all files within a directory, without deleting the directory

Question

I have a directory called outer.

outer contains a directory named inner (which contains lots of files of same extension)

I cd to outer. How can I delete all the files within inner but leave the directory inner remaining (but empty)?

Answer 1

If you want to delete a directory's contents and not the directory itself, all you need to do is tell rm to delete the contents:

rm inner/*

That will delete all non-hidden files in ./inner and leave the directory intact. To also delete any subdirectories, use -r:

rm -r inner/*

If you also want to delete hidden files, you can do (assuming you are using bash):

shopt -s dotglob
rm -r inner/*

That last command will delete all files and all directories in inner, but will leave inner itself intact.

Finally, note that you don't need to cd to outer to run any of these:

$ tree -a outer/
outer/
├── dir
└── inner
    ├── dir
    ├── file
    └── .hidden

3 directories, 2 files

I can now run rm -r outer/inner/* from my current directory, no need to cd outer, and it will remove everything except the directory itself:

$ shopt -s dotglob
$ rm -r outer/inner/*
$ tree -a outer/
outer/
├── dir
└── inner

2 directories, 0 files

Answer 2

find inner -mindepth 1 -delete

Answer 3

If you want to delete all files under some directory structure, but keep all directories, the easiest is to use find's -delete switch:

find /path/to/outer -type f -delete

To first check what would be deleted, just leave out the -delete at the end.

Answer 4

find inner ! -path inner -delete

This would traverse the inner directory and delete everything. The ! -path inner test makes sure that the inner directory itself is not deleted (but all its contents is deleted).

The above would work on Linux with GNU find (the default find). The -delete action is however non-standard (albeit commonly implemented). For a standard compliant variation, use

find inner -depth ! -path inner -exec rm -r {} +

The -depth option makes sure that find does a depth-first traversal of the directory structure. Without this, you may end up trying to delete directories before they are empty.

Answer 5

I use this loop alot, this way you can apply to any number of folders, don't even need to wory!

for i in `ls`; do rm -f $i/*; done

Answer 6

How about this?

cd inner
ls -A | xargs -I {} rm -r "{}"

Edit: DO NOT USE. This has security issues if the filename contains quotes or newlines. (Code injections for example)