In Unix, how do you remove everything in the current directory and below it?
But how do you delete everything in the current directory as well as every subdirectory below it and the contents of all of those subdirectories?
10 Answers 10
Practice safe computing. Simply go up one level in the hierarchy and don’t use a wildcard expression:
The two dashes — tell rm that is not a command-line option, even when it begins with a dash.
Because you are specifically matching a named directory and are thus less likely to delete something that you don’t intend to delete.
doesn’t it delete the directory itself too? You have to do mkdir
hmm. i thought he wanted to delete everything in the current directory, but not the directory itself. how do we do that?
Will delete all files/directories below the current one.
If you want to do the same with another directory whose name you have, you can just name that
If you want to remove not only the sub-directories and files of it, but also the directory itself, omit -mindepth 1 . Do it without the -delete to get a list of the things that will be removed.
I needed to delete all the files in sub-directories, but did not want to delete the sub-directories themselves. find
You need -mindepth 1 if you are specifying a directory ( find
I tried: find -mindepth 1 -delete but i got illegal option — m but it worked great when i removed the mindepth option find . -delete
and then hit ESC-*, and bash will expand the * to an explicit list of files and directories in the current working directory.
- I can review the list of files to delete before hitting ENTER.
- The command history will not contain «rm -rf *» with the wildcard intact, which might then be accidentally reused in the wrong place at the wrong time. Instead, the command history will have the actual file names in there.
- It has also become handy once or twice to answer «wait a second. which files did I just delete?». The file names are visible in the terminal scrollback buffer or the command history.
In fact, I like this so much that I’ve made it the default behavior for TAB with this line in .bashrc:
bind TAB:insert-completions Update: The . stands for current directory, but we cannot use this. The command seems to have explicit checks for . and .. . Use the wildcard globbing instead. But this can be risky.
A safer version IMO is to use:
(this prompts you for confirmation before deleting every file/directory.)
When doing things like this, I’ve found a quick ls -r . first lets you see what you are going to delete. Useful to give a quick idea that you aren’t going to delete the whole disk.
@Yen — because if you do it in the wrong place you can get disastrous results. Using a specific name in the wrong place can only go wrong if the same subdirectory happens to exist there.
It is correct that rm –rf . will remove everything in the current directly including any subdirectories and their content. The single dot ( . ) means the current directory. be carefull not to do rm -rf .. since the double dot ( .. ) means the previous directory.
This being said, if you are like me and have multiple terminal windows open at the same time, you’d better be safe and use rm -ir . Lets look at the command arguments to understand why.
First, if you look at the rm command man page ( man rm under most Unix) you notice that –r means «remove the contents of directories recursively». So, doing rm -r . alone would delete everything in the current directory and everything bellow it.
In rm –rf . the added -f means «ignore nonexistent files, never prompt». That command deletes all the files and directories in the current directory and never prompts you to confirm you really want to do that. -f is particularly dangerous if you run the command under a privilege user since you could delete the content of any directory without getting a chance to make sure that’s really what you want.
On the otherhand, in rm -ri . the -i that replaces the -f means «prompt before any removal». This means you’ll get a chance to say «oups! that’s not what I want» before rm goes happily delete all your files.
In my early sysadmin days I did an rm -rf / on a system while logged with full privileges (root). The result was two days passed a restoring the system from backups. That’s why I now employ rm -ri now.
Remove a Directory in Linux – How to Delete Directories and Contents From the Command Line
Ilenia Magoni
Linux is a popular open source operating system, and its features are often available in your development environment. If you can learn its basic commands, it’ll make your life as a developer much easier.
In this guide you will learn how to delete directories and files from the Linux command line.
The Linux rm Command
The rm (short for remove) command is pretty useful. Let’s learn its syntax and look at a few examples to see it in action.
rm Command Syntax
The syntax is shown below, with args being any number of arguments (folders or files).
Without options you can use it to delete files. But to delete directories you need to use the options for this command.
The options are as follows:
- -r , «recursive» – this option allows you to delete folders and recursively remove their content first
- -i , «interactive» – with this option, it will ask for confirmation each time before you delete something
- -f , «force» – it ignores non-existent files and overrides any confirmation prompt (essentially, it’s the opposite of -i ). It will not remove files from a directory if the directory is write-protected.
- -v , «verbose» – it prints what the command is doing on the terminal
- -d , «directory» – which allows you to delete a directory. It works only if the directory is empty.
Linux rm Command Example
Let’s take a project_folder directory as an example. It has these files and folders inside:
Let’s use this directory to show how the various options work.
You can add the option -v to all commands so that it will write down step by step what’s going on.
So, let’s start with the first option, -r . You just learned that this removes files and folders recursively. You can use it like this rm -r project_folder or also rm -rv project_folder as the verbose option.
It has deleted the project_folder directory and everything inside it, in the order shown.
Let’s recreate the folder and try again.
What happens if you don’t use the -r option and you try to delete the directory anyway? It will not allow it and will instead show an error:
To delete directories you can use the -d option, but if you try to use it in this case it will give an error as the folder is not empty.
The -i option make so that it asks about each action individually.
And you need to press y or n and then Enter after each query.
If you select y for all queries it will delete everything:
If instead you decide to not delete some files or folders, with n it will keep those files and continue with the rest:
The last option we haven’t seen so far is -f , which will suppress errors.
For example writing as below you would be trying to delete two non existing files – there is not a rat.png file, and dog.pmg has a typo and it gives two errors. With the -f option, you will not see the errors.
Conclusion
The Linux command line is pretty useful if you’re a developer. In this article, you have seen one of its possible commands, rm , that you can use to delete directories and files.
Enjoy this new tool in your arsenal!
How do I remove a directory and all its contents?
The following command will do it for you. Use caution though if this isn’t your intention as this also removes files in the directory and subdirectories.
«-f» is «—force» which overrides some sanity checks and prompting. A safer command to start with would be rm -r directoryname .
@JimParis I think the word «safer» is relative. Suppose you are writing a script to run on a remote computer. That script has a command which is supposed to remove a directory. Here, it would be «safer» to use rm -rf directoryname coz you wouldn’t want your script to pause execution, because it’s waiting for user input. Of course, you have to be sure that deleting the directory would do no harm.
if rm -rf directoryname fails you, try using rm -R -f directoryname , or rm —recursive -f directoryname .
If you are not having any luck with these, you should consider reinstalling rm or switching shells.
These were the options available on my rm man page, I looked it up by typing man rm to view my options on recursive deletion and the force options.
Does your rm man page list -r ? What does it do? (Try it in a directory that you create just for testing purposes, with only dummy files (and maybe subdirectories) in it.) What operating system are you using?
P.S. If rm -r doesn’t work, that would be an OS issue, not a shell issue. (Strictly speaking, it would be an issue with the version of rm that you’re using, so you could address it by installing a different version of rm , or searching your system to see whether you already have a different version of rm in some directory other than /bin .)
Ah, right. I forgot to mention I’m on Ubuntu 14.04 When I ran man rm in my terminal, it gave me a text file with the less text viewer. I scrolled found an indented entry with a whole that had the -R and —recursive options cozied up with the -r option, signifying that all of those arguments are identical.
edit: have you tried sudo rm -r directoryName ? The unwritten rules of the basic commands is that -r will allow a program to run recursively on every file your filesystem (starting where ever you choose!) and that -f will forcefully do things, even if it’s dangerous. ‘cd’, ‘mv’, ‘ls’ mostly holds this principle true. ls -r / is gonna be a duzie, and cp -rf / /dev/null will destroy everything on your filesystem.
Other answers show how to completely remove a directory’s content, but IMO they don’t address the literal question of the original post — that is, how can one delete subdirectories (as opposed to usual files). In other words, how can one delete empty directory structures while keeping subdirectories containing files ?
This can be achieved with find :
find directoryname -type d -delete This command will recursively search for directories ( -type d ) through directoryname and -delete them only if their subdirectories or themselves don’t contain any files.