In a shell script, I want to remove all files and directories but one file, in the current directory.
I used
ls | grep -v 'nameoffiletokeep' | xargs rm
this removes files, but directories are not deleted.
find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 ! -iname nameoffiletokeep -print0| xargs -0 rm -rf;
This finds all files and directories that are direct children of the current working directory that are not named nameoffiletokeep and removes them all (recursively for directories), regardless of leading dots (e.g. .hidden, which would be missed if you used a glob like rm -rf *), spaces, or other metachars in the file names.
I've used -iname for case-insensitive matching against nameoffiletokeep, but if you want case-sensitivity, you should use -name. The choice should depend on the underlying file system behavior, and your awareness of the letter-case of the file name you're trying to protect.
If you are using bash, you can use extended globbing:
shopt -s extglob
rm -fr !(nameoffiletokeep)
In zsh the same idea is possible:
setopt extended_glob
rm -fr ^nameoffiletokeep
I have a problem with removing files when I find them.
Task : must find files with spaces and remove them
my try :)
rm $(find -L /root | grep -i ' ')
But i have errors:
rm: cannot remove `/root/test': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `2.txt': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `/root/test': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `3.txt': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `/root/test': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `1.txt': No such file or directory
Please help resolve this problem.
Thanks.
I'm guessing you are finding files with spaces in, or quotes. Try this:
find /test/path -print0 | xargs -0 rm
What this will do is send the filenames to stdout separate by NULL bytes, which xargs will take as delimiters. This allow spaces, quotes and other such fun in the output.
Now, if you are removing directories, rm is not going to work. So you might want to add a -type f to the above.
Note that gnu find itself has a -delete operator which will delete files for you, but you wanted to know why. Hence a shorter route would be:
find /test/path -delete
This will deal with directories too if you do not add -type f. It will also handle deleting the deepest things first (think about why this is needed).
You can specify an -exec argument to the find command to run a command with the resulting file as an argument. In your case, the following command will do what you want.
-type f will print only files. If you want only directories then use -type d. If you use neither of these then it will print both files and directories.
As this is a delete operation, first run the command and see if it's printing the files you want.
find /root -type f -name '* *'
Then if everything is okay, run this to delete them.
find /root -type f -name '* *' -exec rm {} \;
Why not thus:
find /root -type f -name '* *' -exec rm -f {} ';'
I have several hundred PDFs under a directory in UNIX. The names of the PDFs are really long (approx. 60 chars).
When I try to delete all PDFs together using the following command:
rm -f *.pdf
I get the following error:
/bin/rm: cannot execute [Argument list too long]
What is the solution to this error?
Does this error occur for mv and cp commands as well? If yes, how to solve for these commands?
The reason this occurs is because bash actually expands the asterisk to every matching file, producing a very long command line.
Try this:
find . -name "*.pdf" -print0 | xargs -0 rm
Warning: this is a recursive search and will find (and delete) files in subdirectories as well. Tack on -f to the rm command only if you are sure you don't want confirmation.
You can do the following to make the command non-recursive:
find . -maxdepth 1 -name "*.pdf" -print0 | xargs -0 rm
Another option is to use find's -delete flag:
find . -name "*.pdf" -delete
tl;dr
It's a kernel limitation on the size of the command line argument. Use a for loop instead.
Origin of problem
This is a system issue, related to execve and ARG_MAX constant. There is plenty of documentation about that (see man execve, debian's wiki, ARG_MAX details).
Basically, the expansion produce a command (with its parameters) that exceeds the ARG_MAX limit.
On kernel 2.6.23, the limit was set at 128 kB. This constant has been increased and you can get its value by executing:
getconf ARG_MAX
# 2097152 # on 3.5.0-40-generic
Solution: Using for Loop
Use a for loop as it's recommended on BashFAQ/095 and there is no limit except for RAM/memory space:
Dry run to ascertain it will delete what you expect:
for f in *.pdf; do echo rm "$f"; done
And execute it:
for f in *.pdf; do rm "$f"; done
Also this is a portable approach as glob have strong and consistant behavior among shells (part of POSIX spec).
Note: As noted by several comments, this is indeed slower but more maintainable as it can adapt more complex scenarios, e.g. where one want to do more than just one action.
Solution: Using find
If you insist, you can use find but really don't use xargs as it "is dangerous (broken, exploitable, etc.) when reading non-NUL-delimited input":
find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.pdf' -delete
Using -maxdepth 1 ... -delete instead of -exec rm {} + allows find to simply execute the required system calls itself without using an external process, hence faster (thanks to #chepner comment).
References
I'm getting "Argument list too long". How can I process a large list in chunks? # wooledge
execve(2) - Linux man page (search for ARG_MAX) ;
Error: Argument list too long # Debian's wiki ;
Why do I get “/bin/sh: Argument list too long” when passing quoted arguments? # SuperUser
find has a -delete action:
find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.pdf' -delete
Another answer is to force xargs to process the commands in batches. For instance to delete the files 100 at a time, cd into the directory and run this:
echo *.pdf | xargs -n 100 rm
If you’re trying to delete a very large number of files at one time (I deleted a directory with 485,000+ today), you will probably run into this error:
/bin/rm: Argument list too long.
The problem is that when you type something like rm -rf *, the * is replaced with a list of every matching file, like “rm -rf file1 file2 file3 file4” and so on. There is a relatively small buffer of memory allocated to storing this list of arguments and if it is filled up, the shell will not execute the program.
To get around this problem, a lot of people will use the find command to find every file and pass them one-by-one to the “rm” command like this:
find . -type f -exec rm -v {} \;
My problem is that I needed to delete 500,000 files and it was taking way too long.
I stumbled upon a much faster way of deleting files – the “find” command has a “-delete” flag built right in! Here’s what I ended up using:
find . -type f -delete
Using this method, I was deleting files at a rate of about 2000 files/second – much faster!
You can also show the filenames as you’re deleting them:
find . -type f -print -delete
…or even show how many files will be deleted, then time how long it takes to delete them:
root#devel# ls -1 | wc -l && time find . -type f -delete
100000
real 0m3.660s
user 0m0.036s
sys 0m0.552s
Or you can try:
find . -name '*.pdf' -exec rm -f {} \;
you can try this:
for f in *.pdf
do
rm "$f"
done
EDIT:
ThiefMaster comment suggest me not to disclose such dangerous practice to young shell's jedis, so I'll add a more "safer" version (for the sake of preserving things when someone has a "-rf . ..pdf" file)
echo "# Whooooo" > /tmp/dummy.sh
for f in '*.pdf'
do
echo "rm -i \"$f\""
done >> /tmp/dummy.sh
After running the above, just open the /tmp/dummy.sh file in your favorite editor and check every single line for dangerous filenames, commenting them out if found.
Then copy the dummy.sh script in your working dir and run it.
All this for security reasons.
For somone who doesn't have time.
Run the following command on terminal.
ulimit -S -s unlimited
Then perform cp/mv/rm operation.
I'm surprised there are no ulimit answers here. Every time I have this problem I end up here or here. I understand this solution has limitations but ulimit -s 65536 seems to often do the trick for me.
You could use a bash array:
files=(*.pdf)
for((I=0;I<${#files[#]};I+=1000)); do
rm -f "${files[#]:I:1000}"
done
This way it will erase in batches of 1000 files per step.
you can use this commend
find -name "*.pdf" -delete
The rm command has a limitation of files which you can remove simultaneous.
One possibility you can remove them using multiple times the rm command bases on your file patterns, like:
rm -f A*.pdf
rm -f B*.pdf
rm -f C*.pdf
...
rm -f *.pdf
You can also remove them through the find command:
find . -name "*.pdf" -exec rm {} \;
If they are filenames with spaces or special characters, use:
find -name "*.pdf" -delete
For files in current directory only:
find -maxdepth 1 -name '*.pdf' -delete
This sentence search all files in the current directory (-maxdepth 1) with extension pdf (-name '*.pdf'), and then, delete.
i was facing same problem while copying form source directory to destination
source directory had files ~3 lakcs
i used cp with option -r and it's worked for me
cp -r abc/ def/
it will copy all files from abc to def without giving warning of Argument list too long
Try this also If you wanna delete above 30/90 days (+) or else below 30/90(-) days files/folders then you can use the below ex commands
Ex: For 90days excludes above after 90days files/folders deletes, it means 91,92....100 days
find <path> -type f -mtime +90 -exec rm -rf {} \;
Ex: For only latest 30days files that you wanna delete then use the below command (-)
find <path> -type f -mtime -30 -exec rm -rf {} \;
If you wanna giz the files for more than 2 days files
find <path> -type f -mtime +2 -exec gzip {} \;
If you wanna see the files/folders only from past one month .
Ex:
find <path> -type f -mtime -30 -exec ls -lrt {} \;
Above 30days more only then list the files/folders
Ex:
find <path> -type f -mtime +30 -exec ls -lrt {} \;
find /opt/app/logs -type f -mtime +30 -exec ls -lrt {} \;
And another one:
cd /path/to/pdf
printf "%s\0" *.[Pp][Dd][Ff] | xargs -0 rm
printf is a shell builtin, and as far as I know it's always been as such. Now given that printf is not a shell command (but a builtin), it's not subject to "argument list too long ..." fatal error.
So we can safely use it with shell globbing patterns such as *.[Pp][Dd][Ff], then we pipe its output to remove (rm) command, through xargs, which makes sure it fits enough file names in the command line so as not to fail the rm command, which is a shell command.
The \0 in printf serves as a null separator for the file names wich are then processed by xargs command, using it (-0) as a separator, so rm does not fail when there are white spaces or other special characters in the file names.
Argument list too long
As this question title for cp, mv and rm, but answer stand mostly for rm.
Un*x commands
Read carefully command's man page!
For cp and mv, there is a -t switch, for target:
find . -type f -name '*.pdf' -exec cp -ait "/path to target" {} +
and
find . -type f -name '*.pdf' -exec mv -t "/path to target" {} +
Script way
There is an overall workaroung used in bash script:
#!/bin/bash
folder=( "/path to folder" "/path to anther folder" )
if [ "$1" != "--run" ] ;then
exec find "${folder[#]}" -type f -name '*.pdf' -exec $0 --run {} +
exit 0;
fi
shift
for file ;do
printf "Doing something with '%s'.\n" "$file"
done
What about a shorter and more reliable one?
for i in **/*.pdf; do rm "$i"; done
I had the same problem with a folder full of temporary images that was growing day by day and this command helped me to clear the folder
find . -name "*.png" -mtime +50 -exec rm {} \;
The difference with the other commands is the mtime parameter that will take only the files older than X days (in the example 50 days)
Using that multiple times, decreasing on every execution the day range, I was able to remove all the unnecessary files
You can create a temp folder, move all the files and sub-folders you want to keep into the temp folder then delete the old folder and rename the temp folder to the old folder try this example until you are confident to do it live:
mkdir testit
cd testit
mkdir big_folder tmp_folder
touch big_folder/file1.pdf
touch big_folder/file2.pdf
mv big_folder/file1,pdf tmp_folder/
rm -r big_folder
mv tmp_folder big_folder
the rm -r big_folder will remove all files in the big_folder no matter how many. You just have to be super careful you first have all the files/folders you want to keep, in this case it was file1.pdf
To delete all *.pdf in a directory /path/to/dir_with_pdf_files/
mkdir empty_dir # Create temp empty dir
rsync -avh --delete --include '*.pdf' empty_dir/ /path/to/dir_with_pdf_files/
To delete specific files via rsync using wildcard is probably the fastest solution in case you've millions of files. And it will take care of error you're getting.
(Optional Step): DRY RUN. To check what will be deleted without deleting. `
rsync -avhn --delete --include '*.pdf' empty_dir/ /path/to/dir_with_pdf_files/
.
.
.
Click rsync tips and tricks for more rsync hacks
I found that for extremely large lists of files (>1e6), these answers were too slow. Here is a solution using parallel processing in python. I know, I know, this isn't linux... but nothing else here worked.
(This saved me hours)
# delete files
import os as os
import glob
import multiprocessing as mp
directory = r'your/directory'
os.chdir(directory)
files_names = [i for i in glob.glob('*.{}'.format('pdf'))]
# report errors from pool
def callback_error(result):
print('error', result)
# delete file using system command
def delete_files(file_name):
os.system('rm -rf ' + file_name)
pool = mp.Pool(12)
# or use pool = mp.Pool(mp.cpu_count())
if __name__ == '__main__':
for file_name in files_names:
print(file_name)
pool.apply_async(delete_files,[file_name], error_callback=callback_error)
If you want to remove both files and directories, you can use something like:
echo /path/* | xargs rm -rf
I only know a way around this.
The idea is to export that list of pdf files you have into a file. Then split that file into several parts. Then remove pdf files listed in each part.
ls | grep .pdf > list.txt
wc -l list.txt
wc -l is to count how many line the list.txt contains. When you have the idea of how long it is, you can decide to split it in half, forth or something. Using split -l command
For example, split it in 600 lines each.
split -l 600 list.txt
this will create a few file named xaa,xab,xac and so on depends on how you split it.
Now to "import" each list in those file into command rm, use this:
rm $(<xaa)
rm $(<xab)
rm $(<xac)
Sorry for my bad english.
I ran into this problem a few times. Many of the solutions will run the rm command for each individual file that needs to be deleted. This is very inefficient:
find . -name "*.pdf" -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf
I ended up writing a python script to delete the files based on the first 4 characters in the file-name:
import os
filedir = '/tmp/' #The directory you wish to run rm on
filelist = (os.listdir(filedir)) #gets listing of all files in the specified dir
newlist = [] #Makes a blank list named newlist
for i in filelist:
if str((i)[:4]) not in newlist: #This makes sure that the elements are unique for newlist
newlist.append((i)[:4]) #This takes only the first 4 charcters of the folder/filename and appends it to newlist
for i in newlist:
if 'tmp' in i: #If statment to look for tmp in the filename/dirname
print ('Running command rm -rf '+str(filedir)+str(i)+'* : File Count: '+str(len(os.listdir(filedir)))) #Prints the command to be run and a total file count
os.system('rm -rf '+str(filedir)+str(i)+'*') #Actual shell command
print ('DONE')
This worked very well for me. I was able to clear out over 2 million temp files in a folder in about 15 minutes. I commented the tar out of the little bit of code so anyone with minimal to no python knowledge can manipulate this code.
I have faced a similar problem when there were millions of useless log files created by an application which filled up all inodes. I resorted to "locate", got all the files "located"d into a text file and then removed them one by one. Took a while but did the job!
I solved with for
I am on macOS with zsh
I moved thousands only jpg files. Within mv in one line command.
Be sure there are no spaces or special characters in the name of the files you are trying to move
for i in $(find ~/old -type f -name "*.jpg"); do mv $i ~/new; done
A bit safer version than using xargs, also not recursive:
ls -p | grep -v '/$' | grep '\.pdf$' | while read file; do rm "$file"; done
Filtering our directories here is a bit unnecessary as 'rm' won't delete it anyway, and it can be removed for simplicity, but why run something that will definitely return error?
Using GNU parallel (sudo apt install parallel) is super easy
It runs the commands multithreaded where '{}' is the argument passed
E.g.
ls /tmp/myfiles* | parallel 'rm {}'
For remove first 100 files:
rm -rf 'ls | head -100'
I would like to know whether rm can remove all files within a directory (but not the subfolders or files within the subfolders)?
I know some people use:
rm -f /direcname/*.*
but this assumes the filename has an extension which not all do (I want all files - with or without an extension to be removed).
Although find allows you to delete files using -exec rm {} \; you can use
find /direcname -maxdepth 1 -type f -delete
and it is faster. Using -delete implies the -depth option, which means process directory contents before directory.
find /direcname -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec rm {} \;
Explanation:
find searches for files and directories within /direcname
-maxdepth restricts it to looking for files and directories that are direct children of /direcname
-type f restricts the search to files
-exec rm {} \; runs the command rm {} for each file (after substituting the file's path in place of {}).
I would like to know whether rm can remove all files within a directory (but not the subfolders or files within the subfolders)?
That's easy:
$ rm folder/*
Without the -r, the rm command won't touch sub-directories or the files they contain. This will only remove the files in folder and not the sub-directories or their files.
You will see errors telling you that folder/foo is a directory can cannot be removed, but that's actually okay with you. If you want to eliminate these messages, just redirect STDERR:
$ rm folder/* 2> /dev/null
By the way, the exit status of the rm command may not be zero, so you can't check rm for errors. If that's important, you'll have to loop:
$ for file in *
> do
> [[ -f $file ]] && rm $file
> [[ $? -ne 0 ]] && echo "Error in removing file '$file'"
> done
This should work in BASH even if the file names have spaces in them.
You can use
find /direcname -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec rm -f {} \;
A shell solution (without the non-standard find -maxdepth) would be
for file in .* *; do
test -f "$file" && rm "$file"
done
Some shells, notably zsh and perhaps bash version 4 (but not version 3), have a syntax to do that.
With zsh you might just type
rm /dir/path/*(.)
and if you would want to remove any file whose name starts with foo, recursively in subdirectories, you could do
rm /dir/path/**/foo*(.)
the double star feature is (with IMHO better interactive completion) in my opinion enough to switch to zsh for interactive shells. YMMV
The dot in parenthesis suffix indicates that you want only files (not symlinks or directories) to be expanded by the zsh shell.
Unix isn't DOS. There is no special "extension" field in a file name. Any characters after a dot are just part of the name and are called the suffix. There can be more than one suffix, for example.tar.gz. The shell glob character * matches across the . character; it is oblivious to suffixes. So the MS-DOS *.* is just * In Unix.
Almost. * does not match files which start with a .. Objects named with a leading dot are, by convention, "hidden". They do not show up in ls either unless you specify -a.
(This means that the . and .. directory entries for "self" and "parent" are considered hidden.)
To match hidden entries also, use .*
The rm command does not remove directories (when not operated recursively with -r).
Try rm <directory> and see. Even if the directory is empty, it will refuse.
So, the way you remove all (non-hidden) files, pipes, devices, sockets and symbolic links from a directory (but leave the subdirectories alone) is in fact:
rm /path/to/directory/*
to also remove the hidden ones which start with .:
rm /path/to/directory/{*,.*}
This syntax is brace expansion. Brace expansion is not pattern matching; it is just a short-hand for generating multiple arguments, in this case:
rm /path/to/directory/* /path/to/directory/.*
this expansion takes place first first and then globbing takes place to generate the names to be deleted.
Note that various solutions posted here have various issues:
find /path/to/directory -type f -delete
# -delete is not Unix standard; GNU find extension
# without -maxdepth 1 this will recurse over all files
# -maxdepth is also a GNU extension
# -type f finds only files; so this neglects to delete symlinks, fifos, etc.
The GNU find solutions have the benefit that they work even if the number of directory entries to be deleted is huge: too large to pass in a single call to rm. Another benefit is that the built-in -delete does not have issues with passing funny path names to an external command.
The portable workaround for the problem of too many directory entries is to list the entries with ls and pipe to xargs:
( cd /path/to/directory ; ls -a | xargs rm -- )
The parentheses mean "do these commands in a sub-process"; this way the effect of the cd is forgotten, which is useful in scripting. ls -a includes the hidden files.
We now include a -- after rm which means "this is the last option; everything else is a non-option argument". This guards us against directory entries whose names are indistinguishable from options. What if a file is called -rf and ends up the first argument? Then you have rm -rf ... which will blow off subdirectories.
The easiest way to do this is to use:
rm *
In order to remove directories, you must specify the option -r
rm -r
so your directories and anything contained in them will not be removed by using
rm *
per the man page for rm, its purpose is to remove files, which is why this works
If we want to delete all files and directories we use, rm -rf *.
But what if i want all files and directories be deleted at a shot, except one particular file?
Is there any command for that? rm -rf * gives the ease of deletion at one shot, but deletes even my favourite file/directory.
Thanks in advance
find can be a very good friend:
$ ls
a/ b/ c/
$ find * -maxdepth 0 -name 'b' -prune -o -exec rm -rf '{}' ';'
$ ls
b/
$
Explanation:
find * -maxdepth 0: select everything selected by * without descending into any directories
-name 'b' -prune: do not bother (-prune) with anything that matches the condition -name 'b'
-o -exec rm -rf '{}' ';': call rm -rf for everything else
By the way, another, possibly simpler, way would be to move or rename your favourite directory so that it is not in the way:
$ ls
a/ b/ c/
$ mv b .b
$ ls
a/ c/
$ rm -rf *
$ mv .b b
$ ls
b/
Short answer
ls | grep -v "z.txt" | xargs rm
Details:
The thought process for the above command is :
List all files (ls)
Ignore one file named "z.txt" (grep -v "z.txt")
Delete the listed files other than z.txt (xargs rm)
Example
Create 5 files as shown below:
echo "a.txt b.txt c.txt d.txt z.txt" | xargs touch
List all files except z.txt
ls|grep -v "z.txt"
a.txt
b.txt
c.txt
d.txt
We can now delete(rm) the listed files by using the xargs utility :
ls|grep -v "z.txt"|xargs rm
You can type it right in the command-line or use this keystroke in the script
files=`ls -l | grep -v "my_favorite_dir"`; for file in $files; do rm -rvf $file; done
P.S. I suggest -i switch for rm to prevent delition of important data.
P.P.S You can write the small script based on this solution and place it to the /usr/bin (e.g. /usr/bin/rmf). Now you can use it as and ordinary app:
rmf my_favorite_dir
The script looks like (just a sketch):
#!/bin/sh
if [[ -z $1 ]]; then
files=`ls -l`
else
files=`ls -l | grep -v $1`
fi;
for file in $files; do
rm -rvi $file
done;
At least in zsh
rm -rf ^filename
could be an option, if you only want to preserve one single file.
If it's just one file, one simple way is to move that file to /tmp or something, rm -Rf the directory and then move it back. You could alias this as a simple command.
The other option is to do a find and then grep out what you don't want (using -v or directly using one of finds predicates) and then rming the remaining files.
For a single file, I'd do the former. For anything more, I'd write something custom similar to what thkala said.
In bash you have the !() glob operator, which inverts the matched pattern. So to delete everything except the file my_file_name.txt, try this:
shopt -s extglob
rm -f !(my_file_name.txt)
See this article for more details:
http://karper.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/deleting-all-files-in-a-directory-with-exceptions/
I don't know of such a program, but I have wanted it in the past for some times. The basic syntax would be:
IFS='
' for f in $(except "*.c" "*.h" -- *); do
printf '%s\n' "$f"
done
The program I have in mind has three modes:
exact matching (with the option -e)
glob matching (default, like shown in the above example)
regex matching (with the option -r)
It takes the patterns to be excluded from the command line, followed by the separator --, followed by the file names. Alternatively, the file names might be read from stdin (if the option -s is given), each on a line.
Such a program should not be hard to write, in either C or the Shell Command Language. And it makes a good excercise for learning the Unix basics. When you do it as a shell program, you have to watch for filenames containing whitespace and other special characters, of course.
I see a lot of longwinded means here, that work, but with
a/ b/ c/ d/ e/
rm -rf *.* !(b*)
this removes everything except directory b/ and its contents (assuming your file is in b/.
Then just cd b/ and
rm -rf *.* !(filename)
to remove everything else, but the file (named "filename") that you want to keep.
mv subdir/preciousfile ./
rm -rf subdir
mkdir subdir
mv preciousfile subdir/
This looks tedious, but it is rather safe
avoids complex logic
never use rm -rf *, its results depend on your current directory (which could be / ;-)
never use a globbing *: its expansion is limited by ARGV_MAX.
allows you to check the error after each command, and maybe avoid the disaster caused by the next command.
avoids nasty problems caused by space or NL in the filenames.
cd ..
ln trash/useful.file ./
rm -rf trash/*
mv useful.file trash/
you need to use regular expression for this. Write a regular expression which selects all other files except the one you need.