How to delete all files in a directory except some?

Question

I need to delete all files in a directory, but exclude some of them. For example, in a directory with the files a b c ... z, I need to delete all except for u and p. Is there an easy way to do this?

Answer 1

What I do in those cases is to type

rm *

Then I press Ctrl+X,* to expand * into all visible file names.

Then I can just remove the two files I like to keep from the list and finally execute the command line.

Answer 2

To rm all but u,p in bash just type:

rm !(u|p)

This requires the following option to be set:

shopt -s extglob

See more: glob - Greg's Wiki

Answer 3

You can use find

find . ! -name u ! -name p -maxdepth 1 -type f -delete

• ! negates the next expression
• -name specifies a filename
• -maxdepth 1 will make find process the specified directory only (find by default traverses directories)
• -type f will process only files (and not for example directories)
• -delete will delete the files

You can then tune the conditions looking at the man page of find

Update

• Keep in mind that the order of the elements of the expressions is significant (see the documentation)

• Test your command first by using -print instead of -delete

  find . ! -name u ! -name p -maxdepth 1 -type f -print
  

Answer 4

Simple:

mv the files you want in a upper directory, rm the directory and then mv them back.

Answer 5

Somewhat similar to this answer but no special options are needed, as far as I know the following is "ancient" functionality supported by any (vaguely) /bin/sh resembling shell (e.g. bash, zsh, ksh, etc)

rm [^up]

Answer 6

Doing it without find:

ls | grep -v '(u|p)' | xargs rm

(Edit: "u" and "v", as in other places here, are being used as generic versions of entire regexes. Obviously you'll want to be careful to anchor your regexes to avoid matching too many things.)

You're definitely going to want a script if you're going to be doing much of this, as others have suggested.

Answer 7

In zsh:

setopt extended_glob  # probably in your .zshrc

then

rm ^(u|p)

or

rm *~(u|p)

The second will work even if you have ^ in $histchars for history substitution, and of course you can put an arbitrary glob before the ~.

Answer 8

GLOBIGNORE takes a colon-separated list

GLOBIGNORE=u:p
rm *

Answer 9

Back in the floppy era I had a dos executable called "Except" that would move things out of the current directory temporarially and execute a command, so you could say:

except *.txt del *.*

to delete everything but your text files.

This would be a pretty trivial thing to implement as a shell script and if this is the kind of thing you are likely to do more than twice it seems like it would be a good idea.

Answer 10

 find . -maxdepth 1 ! -name "u" ! -name "p" -type f -exec rm -rf {} \;

This will delete all files except u and p in unix

Answer 11

For those preferring to specify arbitrary complex exclude patterns (spanning all affected filenames) in a full blown regexp emacs, posix-awk or posix-extended style (see find man page) I would recommend this one. It excludes u and p in current dir in this example. This may be handy for scripts.

find -regextype posix-awk ! -regex './(u|p)' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

Answer 12

Use:

find . -type f ! -name 'u' ! -name 'p' ! -name '*.ext' -delete
find . -type d ! -name 'u' ! -name 'p' ! -name '*.ext' -delete

in order to delete all files including directories, except u, p and .ext files.

Answer 13

I always use:

rm [a-o,q-t,v-z]*

This will allow you to define how granular you want to make it. So if you want to delete a through o and Z files you can use:

rm [a-o,z]*

Answer 14

Yet another version using xargs:

ls -1 | grep -v do_not_delete | xargs -I files rm "files"

Note that xargs -I is needed to handle filenames including spaces correctly.

Answer 15

Yet another:

for FILE in ./*; do if [[ $FILE != ./u* ]] || [[ $FILE != ./p* ]];then rm $FILE; fi; done;

It's kind of lengthy and I don't know if you could easily make it into an function that could easily accommodate and arbitrary number of arguments, but it works well.

And it's pure bash goodness.

Answer 16

Here's another variant. You can type:

rm -i *

or:

rm --interactive *

So rm will ask you to confirm deleting of each file.

Answer 17

A simple way that is hard to mess up: let's say you want to delete everything except *.pdf:

mkdir tmp
mv *.pdf tmp
rm *
mv tmp/* .
rm -r tmp