66
votes
Accepted
Delete all folders inside a folder except one with specific name
This will delete all folders inside ./myfolder except that ./myfolder/test2 and all its contents will be preserved:
find ./myfolder -mindepth 1 ! -regex '^./myfolder/test2\(/.*\)?' -delete
How it ...
- 74k
45
votes
Accepted
Unable to delete this file as root
The file has the i ("immutable") attribute, according to the output from lsattr that you show.
From the chattr(1) manual (on Ubuntu):
A file with the i attribute cannot be modified: it ...
- 327k
39
votes
Accepted
Get list of files deleted by `find -delete`
Just add -print to the end of the command:
find . -name .DS_Store -delete -print
This would output the pathnames of the files found.
If this is on a macOS system (or on any of the BSD systems), using ...
- 327k
31
votes
How do I delete a directory that contains only '.' and '..', but rm says is not empty?
Your directory looks empty, but the ls output indicates that there is a file in there since the link count for the directory is 3 rather than 2 (an empty directory on an APFS filesystem should have a ...
- 327k
26
votes
Delete files with names that appear to begin with '?' in command line
The appropriate way to remove these kind of files is by using the inode value of the file.
Use the following command to get inode value
ls -li
12582925 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 646 May 23 02:...
- 9,067
23
votes
Accepted
Delete a file called '.env'$'\r'
On recent-ish Linux systems (with GNU tools as in most desktop distributions), ls prints names with weird characters using the shell's quoting syntax. If that '.env'$'\r' is what ls gives, the name of ...
- 135k
23
votes
Delete a file called '.env'$'\r'
If using GNU find, then you can delete it by the inode.
ls -lid -- .env*
The number in the first column is the inode. Note what it is for the file that you actually want should others with the string ...
- 10.9k
19
votes
Accepted
How to delete all except for some specific folder under parent-folder
You can use find with a negation (at your own risk).
find all file and folders named "a" or "b":
find -name a -o -name b
find all files and folders name "a" or "b" in the current directory"
find -...
- 781
18
votes
Delete all folders inside a folder except one with specific name
Using bash:
shopt -s extglob
rm -r myfolder/!(test2)/
Example:
$ tree myfolder/
myfolder/
├── test1
│ └── file1
├── test2
│ └── file2
└── test3
└── file3
$ echo rm -r myfolder/!(test2)
rm -...
- 66.7k
18
votes
Accepted
Delete files with names that appear to begin with '?' in command line
The character is not a question mark. The ls utility will replace non printable characters with ?. It is further unclear whether the non printable character really is the first character in the ...
- 327k
17
votes
Accepted
Delete files and folders recursively in subdirectories
You can do it using following find command:
find /path/to/transfer -mindepth 2 -delete
-mindepth 2 parameter tells find to ignore first two level of directories: searched directory itself, and all ...
- 1,993
15
votes
Accepted
rsync with delete option, but preserve what's deleted
You want the -b option (which causes rsync to backup deleted stuff) combined with the --backup-dir option, which will let you direct WHERE rsync backs things up.
- 1,179
13
votes
Delete a file called '.env'$'\r'
Ask the shell to wildcard the tricky part of the name, and ask rm to remember it for you so you don't need to type it.
$ touch '.env'$'\r'
$ ls -l .env*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 paul paul 0 May 20 16:51 '.env'$'\...
- 8,431
12
votes
Accepted
Delete all files within a directory, without deleting the directory
If you want to delete a directory's contents and not the directory itself, all you need to do is tell rm to delete the contents:
rm inner/*
That will delete all non-hidden files in ./inner and leave ...
- 238k
11
votes
How do I delete a directory in Centos 7
You can use
rm -f -r john
It will recursively delete john directory even if it contains files or subdirectories.
- 111
11
votes
Delete a file called '.env'$'\r'
A quick-and-dirty way to select pesky filenames is to use the autocompletion feature of the shell.
Type rm , then hit the TAB key until the file to remove is printed on screen.
- 29.2k
10
votes
Accepted
Recursively cleanup all folders and sub-folders in a folder that have no files in them
See if this does what you want:
find mainFolder -depth -empty -type d -exec rmdir {} \;
That should find directories in mainFolder using a depth-first traversal that are empty, and remove those ...
- 13.8k
9
votes
Accepted
sed/awk to remove double quotes " that are inside of curly braces {}
It would be easier with sed:
sed -e :1 -e 's/\({[^}]*\)"\([^}]*}\)/\1\2/g; t1'
Or perl:
perl -pe 's{\{.*?\}}{$& =~ s/"//gr}ge'
Note that it assumes there's no nested {...}.
To handle nested {....
- 533k
8
votes
Accepted
How to check if its safe to delete a library?
You should probably let the package manager of your distribution decide if it's safe to remove it or not.
Maybe try to remove it with apt-get remove libgme0 and see if it wants to remove other ...
- 2,102
8
votes
Accepted
Why does `find` not delete the files it found?
Juxtaposition binds more tightly than the -o operator. So your command is equivalent to
find C:\\path\\to\\Pictures\\pmcctv \( -name cap_*.jpg \) -o \
\( -name ...
8
votes
Can I Delete 70-persistent-net.rules?
You could, but there is probably an even better solution:
Either in /lib/udev/rules.d or in /etc/udev/rules.d, there should be a 80-persistent-net-generator.rules file (the number at the beginning ...
- 90.6k
8
votes
Accepted
sed or awk: remove numbers after a symbol
Just a slight modification from your sed command:
sed 's/^>[0-9]\+[_]/>/g'
the s is the sed substitute command, it searches for the string on the left hand side and replaces it with the string ...
- 36.4k
8
votes
How do I delete a directory that contains only '.' and '..', but rm says is not empty?
The directory entries . and .. are an artefact from the early 1970s, when UNIX did run on tiny machines and code needed to be tiny as well.
So the people created real hardlinks to directories named . ...
- 18.9k
7
votes
How do I delete a directory with hyphen in the name please?
try:
rm -r -- -ltr
man rm:
To remove a file whose name starts with a '-', for example '-foo', use
one of these commands:
$ rm -- -foo
OR
$ rm ./-foo
7
votes
Delete lines with value below (or above) threshold
In awk, you can use something like for (i = 1 ; i <= NF ; i++) { ... } to loop over all fields on a line. With that, something like:
awk '{for(i = 1 ; i <= NF ; i++) {
if ($i ~ /^[0-9]...
- 135k
7
votes
Accepted
Delete lines with value below (or above) threshold
perl to the rescue
$ cat ip.txt
AA 110 B 10 .. BB 15 ... BBB 20 D F 25 D D
AA 111 B 50 .. BB 55 ... BBB 30 F F 45 F F
AA 112 C 2 .. BB 3 ... BBB 0 ...
- 11.9k
7
votes
Accepted
How to remove the trailing slash from a variable which defines a directory from a time test output
Try this posix parameter expansion :
echo "${client%/}"
so
echo "${client%/} has files older than 2 days ..."
Parameter Expansion expands parameters: "$foo", "$1". You can use it to perform ...
- 32.7k
7
votes
Accepted
Remove a combination of numbers and symbols from a string using the ${VARNAME//pattern/} way
With ksh or bash -O extglob (or after shopt -s extglob in a bash script) or zsh -o kshglob (or after set -o kshglob in a zsh script):
VG_MY=${VG_MY//+(=)+([0-9])+(=)/}
The +(...) is a ksh extended ...
- 533k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible