Remove all files and folder in linux

How to remove files and directories quickly via terminal (bash shell) [closed]

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From a terminal window: When I use the rm command it can only remove files.
When I use the rmdir command it only removes empty folders. If I have a directory nested with files and folders within folders with files and so on, is there a way to delete all the files and folders without all the strenuous command typing? If it makes a difference, I am using the Mac Bash shell from a terminal, not Microsoft DOS or Linux.

Just in case you wish to restore the files in future , don’t use «rm» for such cases . Use «rm-trash» : github.com/nateshmbhat/rm-trash

4 Answers 4

-r «recursive» -f «force» (suppress confirmation messages)

+1 and glad you added the «Be careful!» part. definitely a «Sawzall» command that can quickly turn a good day into a bad one.. if wielded carelessly.

@itsmatt: You know what they say. give someone a Sawzall, and suddenly every problem looks like hours of fun!

On a Mac? Do this instead: brew install trash then trash -rf some_dir This will move the unwanted directory into your trashbin instead of just vanishing Prestige-style into the ether. (source)

Would remove everything (folders & files) in the current directory.

But be careful! Only execute this command if you are absolutely sure, that you are in the right directory.

Yes, there is. The -r option tells rm to be recursive, and remove the entire file hierarchy rooted at its arguments; in other words, if given a directory, it will remove all of its contents and then perform what is effectively an rmdir .

The other two options you should know are -i and -f . -i stands for interactive; it makes rm prompt you before deleting each and every file. -f stands for force; it goes ahead and deletes everything without asking. -i is safer, but -f is faster; only use it if you’re absolutely sure you’re deleting the right thing. You can specify these with -r or not; it’s an independent setting.

And as usual, you can combine switches: rm -r -i is just rm -ri , and rm -r -f is rm -rf .

Also note that what you’re learning applies to bash on every Unix OS: OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. In fact, rm ‘s syntax is the same in pretty much every shell on every Unix OS. OS X, under the hood, is really a BSD Unix system.

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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 afterwards. But then any hardlink referring to that directory will be a distinct directory afterwards.

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 -mindepth 2 -delete worked great!

You need -mindepth 1 if you are specifying a directory ( find -mindepth 1 -delete ). Otherwise Johannes is right it will not delete the current working directory (when using find -delete ).

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.

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How to remove all files of a directory in Linux

Files are created and saved in the directories of Linux, they can be text files, image files, music files, or any other format. These files occupy some space and many files present in our system are purposeless, they should be deleted in order to make space for new files.

In Linux, we can either delete/remove a single file or delete all the files from a directory using a single command in a terminal. In this write-up, we will discuss the ways to remove all the files in a directory of Linux.

How to remove all files in a directory of Linux

We have directories in a path /home/hammad/ with a name, new_directory, new_directory1, new_directory2, and new_directory3 that contain files, to view it, and list down the components of the path:

To view the files of “new_directory”, use the command:

To remove these files from the directory “new_directory”, we can simply use the command of “rm”, the general syntax of using the rm command is:

The explanation to the syntax is simple:

• Use the command of rm to remove the files from the directory
• Use any options like to display the progress, to remove it forcibly
• Type the pathname where the directory is located
• Mention the filenames which you want to remove or simply use “*” to remove all the files from the directory

Suppose we want to remove all the files from the “/home/hammad/new_directory/*” path, we will use the command:

We can also display the progress of the removed files by using the flag “-v”, we will execute the command:

In the above command, the “-v” flag is used to display the progress of the command where “*” is used to delete all the files of the directory and for verification that all the files are deleted, we will again list down the content of the directory using the command:

The above command verified that the directory contains no files and there are some other useful options as well; the “-f” which is used to delete the files forcibly and “-r” deletes the directory and its files, we will use all these flags altogether to delete the files of “new_directory2”

In the above output, we can see that the “-r” flag removes the sub directory, “officedirectory”, from the new_directory2, to list the files of new_directory2, we use the ls command:

We have another option that is “-i”, if we use this option, it will ask for permission before deleting each file should we continue to delete it or not, if we still want to delete it, type “y” or “n” to cancel it. We will use “-i”, to delete files of new_directory3:

In the above command, it can be seen that we have confirmed to delete “myfile” and canceled to delete “myscript.sh”, to view the files in the folder:

We can see the “myscript.sh” file has not been removed from the directory.

To delete all the empty directories we use the “rmdir” command:

All the empty directories are removed, use ls command to verify:

Conclusion

Removing the files from the directory will create free space for the new files and applications. Therefore, files of no use should be removed from the system. To remove all the files from the directory the convenient way is to use the rm command which is discussed in this write-up. Different options can also be used along with the rm command which is also discussed with the help of examples.

About the author

Hammad Zahid

I’m an Engineering graduate and my passion for IT has brought me to Linux. Now here I’m learning and sharing my knowledge with the world.

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