384
votes
Accepted
Delete files older than X days +
Be careful with special file names (spaces, quotes) when piping to rm.
There is a safe alternative - the -delete option:
find /path/to/directory/ -mindepth 1 -mtime +5 -delete
That's it, no separate ...
- 5,995
151
votes
Accepted
Have rm not report when a file is missing?
Use the -f option. It will silently ignore nonexistent files.
From man rm:
-f, --force
ignore nonexistent files and arguments, never prompt
[The "never prompt" part means that (a) -f ...
- 72.9k
122
votes
Accepted
Why does the following script delete itself?
The kernel interprets the line starting with #! and uses it to run the script, passing in the script's name; so this ends up running
/bin/rm scriptname
which deletes the script. (As Stéphane ...
- 403k
106
votes
Accepted
Deleting billions of files from a directory while seeing the progress as well
You can use rm -v to have rm print one line per file deleted. This way you can see that rm is indeed working to delete files. But if you have billions of files then all you will see is that rm is ...
- 26.6k
104
votes
Accepted
Why is rm allowed to delete a file under ownership of a different user?
The reason why this is permitted is related to what removing a file actually does. Conceptually, rm's job is to remove a name entry from a directory. The fact that the file may then become unreachable ...
- 42.7k
103
votes
How to get rid of "No match found" when running "rm *"
This behaviour is controlled by several of Zsh's globbing options. By default, if a command line contains a globbing expression which doesn't match anything, Zsh will print the error message you're ...
- 403k
90
votes
Accepted
Why can't I remove the '.' directory?
Removing the current directory does not affect the file system integrity or its logical organization. Preventing . removal is done to follow the POSIX standard which states in the rmdir(2) manual page:...
- 60k
78
votes
Accepted
How can I harden bash scripts against causing harm when changed in the future?
set -u
or
set -o nounset
This would make the current shell treat expansions of unset variables as an error:
$ unset build
$ set -u
$ rm -rf "$build"/*
bash: build: unbound variable
set -u and set ...
- 316k
75
votes
Accepted
Why is the wild card character * so different between the zip and rm commands?
You've explained the situation very well. The final piece to the puzzle is that unzip can handle wildcards itself:
http://www.info-zip.org/mans/unzip.html
ARGUMENTS
file[.zip]
...
Wildcard ...
- 66k
69
votes
Accepted
I just deleted everything in my home directory. How? And why are some files still there?
Ouch. You aren't the first victim.
What went wrong?
Starting in your home directory, e.g. /home/felix, or even in /home/felix/src or /home/felix/Downloads/src.
cd ../Dependencies/cpython
Failed ...
68
votes
Accepted
Why can't I delete this file as root?
From root user check attributes of files
# lsattr
if you notice i (immutable) or a (append-only), remove those attributes:
# man chattr
# chattr -i [filename]
# chattr -a [filename]
- 1,363
68
votes
Accepted
How do I pipe ls to grep, and delete the files filtered by grep?
This almost made me wince.
You might want to stop pointing that shotgun at your foot. Basically any kind of parsing of ls is going to be more complicated and error-prone than established methods like ...
- 50k
65
votes
What is the difference between 'rm' and 'unlink'?
POSIX specifies that the unlink utility calls the C library unlink function and nothing else. It takes no option. If you pass a valid path name to something which isn't a directory, and if you have ...
- 7,176
55
votes
How do I pipe ls to grep, and delete the files filtered by grep?
You had the right idea, just missed some details. Since you're dealing with a list coming to STDIN and rm expects parameters, you need to use xargs.
Thus:
ls | grep chrome | xargs rm
Should give ...
- 16.5k
54
votes
Accepted
How can I delete a file named ">"?
Any of these should work:
sudo rm \>
sudo rm '>'
sudo rm ">"
sudo find . -name '>' -delete
sudo find . -name '>' -exec rm {} +
Note that the last two commands, those using find, will ...
- 232k
50
votes
Accepted
Deleting specific files based on filename from terminal
You don't need a loop or extra commands where you have Bash Shell Brace Expansion.
rm -f rho_{0..200000..5000}.txt
Explanation: {start..end..step}. The -f to ignore prompt on non-existent files.
P....
- 40.7k
50
votes
Accidentally ran sudo rm /* on my Arch Linux installation
Arch Linux has four symbolic links in /:
bin -> usr/bin
lib -> usr/lib
lib64 -> usr/lib
sbin -> usr/bin
You should be able to recreate them (using a Live-USB or an emergency shell) or by ...
- 1,498
47
votes
How to quote arguments with xargs
I had a similar requirement and ended up using the -I switch to have a placeholder and I was able to quote it.
find . -size +1M | xargs -I {} rm "{}"
- 579
47
votes
Accepted
Why does rm manual say that we can run it without any argument, when this is not true?
The standard synopsis for the rm utility is specified in the POSIX standard1&2 as
rm [-iRr] file...
rm -f [-iRr] [file...]
In its first form, it does require at least one file operand, but in ...
- 316k
46
votes
Accepted
How to unlink (remove) the special hardlink "." created for a folder?
It is technically possible to delete ., at least on EXT4 filesystems. If you create a filesystem image in test.img, mount it and create a test folder, then unmount it again, you can edit it using ...
- 403k
43
votes
Accepted
Cannot remove file: "Structure needs cleaning"
That is strongly indicative of file-system corruption. You should unmount, make a sector-level backup of your disk, and then run e2fsck to see what is up. If there is major corruption, you may later ...
- 4,149
40
votes
How do I pipe ls to grep, and delete the files filtered by grep?
You can also use the find command with a wildcard:
find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*chrome*' -delete
Note that the "-maxdepth" argument ensures that find only works in the current directory, and doesn't ...
- 590
39
votes
Accepted
What is :>filename.txt Doing?
As you have discovered, this just empties the file contents (it truncates the file); that is different from rm as rm would actually remove the file altogether. Additionally, :>file.txt will ...
- 35.4k
38
votes
Is it possible to determine the progress of an rm command?
from
man rm
use the -v option:
-v, --verbose
explain what is being done
- 707
35
votes
rm -rf all files and all hidden files without . & .. error
Just realised this is the most convenient way in most Linux distros:
ls -A1 | xargs rm -rf
where
-A = list everything except . and ..
-1 = put every item in one line
- 466
35
votes
Is `yes | rm -r` safer than `rm -rf`?
Short answer
No. However, I really like your creativity of piping commands together. Still, yes|rm -r is a nice example of UUOC (useless use of cat) - an acronym (or better jargon) for command line ...
- 647
35
votes
Accepted
Why doesn't rmdir work recursively?
Unlinking directories was originally a privileged operation:
It is also illegal to unlink a directory
(except for the super-user).
So rmdir was implemented as a small binary which only removed ...
- 403k
33
votes
Accepted
Remove files newer than X day and hour
You might want to use find -newermt.
Make sure to review files to be removed first:
find /usr/include -type l -newermt "Jun 2 22:27"
Use -delete to perform actual removes.
find /usr/include -type ...
- 12k
32
votes
Accepted
Since when do the POSIX and GNU rm not delete /?
You can find the HTML version of all the editions of POSIX 2008 online:
original: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2008edition/utilities/rm.html
TC1 (2013 edition) http://pubs....
- 513k
31
votes
Accepted
Deleting files with spaces in their names
You can use standard globbing on the rm command:
rm -- *\ *
This will delete any file whose name contains a space; the space is escaped so the shell doesn't interpret it as a separator. Adding -- ...
- 403k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible