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?

The answers below are a lot better, but you could just make the files to save read-only, delete all, and then change them back to their original permissions (as long as you don't use rm -f). You'd have to know what permissions to restore and you'd have to know that nothing needed write access to them during the process. This is why the other answers are better. — Joe, Jan 15 '13 at 05:13
If you also want to delete hidden files run shopt -s dotglob before running rm (...). — , Jan 28 '13 at 08:07

score 145 · Answer 1 · edited Jan 08 '13 at 13:07

145

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

edited Jan 08 '13 at 13:07

slhck

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answered Jan 08 '13 at 12:34

sparkie

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you must have 'extglobbing' active: shopt -s extglob – sparkie Jan 08 '13 at 13:07
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You need to shopt -s extglob, @Ashot. Also, it's just files, not directories, which is why I've removed the -rf options in your command. – slhck Jan 08 '13 at 13:07
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If you need to exclude one file of a selection of files, try this: rm !(index).html. This will delete all files ending in ".html" with the exception of "index.html". – mzuther Jul 24 '15 at 21:46
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just erased all of my files. thanks – Shōgun8 Jul 13 '23 at 22:45

score 113 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 08 '13 at 12:18

113

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.

answered Jan 08 '13 at 12:18

Oliver Salzburg

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I guess this works only as long as the list of files which * expands too isn't getting too long. :-} – Frerich Raabe Jan 08 '13 at 16:57
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@FrerichRaabe: Indeed. If it's too long a different approach will be required. Luckily we now have a list of great options :) – Oliver Salzburg Jan 08 '13 at 17:00
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Esc followed by * will also expand the "*". – slowpoison Jan 09 '13 at 20:45
This only works with rm; was looking for mv, cp, chmod etc.. :( – Santosh Kumar Jan 17 '13 at 15:46
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@SantoshKumar: That doesn't make sense to me. The expansion will always work, it doesn't depend on what command you want to use afterwards. – Oliver Salzburg Jan 17 '13 at 18:18
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@OliverSalzburg Sorry, the combination is little bit confusing. I think you should write like Ctrl + Shift + x + * – Santosh Kumar Jan 18 '13 at 05:22
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@SantoshKumar: But that's not the combination. – Oliver Salzburg Jan 18 '13 at 11:26
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Works in practice but can't be scripted. I think the find solution is the best. – flungo May 10 '15 at 14:10
@Oliver Salzburg, the combination is not working on my Korn shell , what I might be doing wrong could you please advise? solution from slowpoision , esc followed by * worked though. Thanks – Forever Learner Feb 02 '18 at 11:22

score 84 · Answer 3 · edited Feb 12 '14 at 14:25

84

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

edited Feb 12 '14 at 14:25

Andy Shulman

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answered Jan 08 '13 at 12:35

Matteo

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order of predicates is critical here. If one put -delete just after . it will be disaster (will delete all files in CWD) – Michał Šrajer Jan 08 '13 at 17:34
This could be written more compactly as find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '[^up]' -delete – kojiro Jan 08 '13 at 18:09
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@kojiro yes but only for files that are just one letter. With more complex names the regex could be a mess. – Matteo Jan 08 '13 at 20:15
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find is my best friend, especially when there are too many files to glob – Terence Johnson Jan 09 '13 at 22:36
+1 for the explanation of all arguments – Mohan Apr 28 '20 at 19:20
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+1 as it works with sh vs rm fashion – david Sep 05 '21 at 18:09

user176581 · Answer 4 · 2013-01-09T03:48:40.113

44

Simple:

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

edited Jan 09 '13 at 03:48

answered Jan 08 '13 at 12:22

user176581

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Offcourse, mv them to a directory higher. Try not to mv them to a subdirectory you are deleting... – Konerak Jan 08 '13 at 19:21
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@Konerak: rm without -r won't remove subdirectories. – reinierpost Jan 08 '13 at 23:07
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This will overwrite files with the same name in the destination directory – Matteo Jan 09 '13 at 09:29
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I am downvoting this because while it can be handy, it also is non-atomic and effectively removes all files from the directory during a short period of time; this would not be acceptable if, for instance, the files are being shared on the network. – sam hocevar Jan 10 '13 at 12:19
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Also you'd need write access on the parent directory, which you likely not have on a shared web server. – Jan Heinrich Reimer Apr 04 '20 at 20:57

score 17 · Answer 5 · edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:16

17

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]

edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:16

Community

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answered Jan 08 '13 at 14:22

hlovdal

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This works for the 1-char filenames. For longer names, sparkie's answer is better. – glenn jackman Jan 08 '13 at 15:31
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What would be wrong with rm [^up]*? I do similar things rather often. – user Jan 08 '13 at 15:33
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@MichaelKjörling - this would delete all files beginning with either u or p, not just those with the names u and p. I think the OP (@Ashot) meant the a-z and u,p,etc. symbolically and not literally. – Sudipta Chatterjee Jan 09 '13 at 09:07
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@HobbesofCalvin That would delete all files not beginning with u or p, not those beginning with them. – rjmunro Jan 09 '13 at 10:48

score 15 · Answer 6 · edited Jan 10 '13 at 20:23

15

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.

edited Jan 10 '13 at 20:23

Community

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answered Jan 09 '13 at 03:54

tquid

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grep will not handle extended regexpt by default: either use -E or egrep – Matteo Jan 09 '13 at 09:28
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this will exclude any file containing a u or a p – Matteo Jan 09 '13 at 09:28
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@Matteo No it won't. The grep isn't grepping the files, it's grepping the output of the ls command. You're thinking of something like grep -L (u|p)' * | xargs rm where -L means list filenames not containing a match. – rjmunro Jan 09 '13 at 10:52
@rjmunro Yes it will: touch u uu; ls | egrep -v '(u|p)' gives an empty ouput – Matteo Jan 09 '13 at 12:28
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Oh, you mean any file who's name contains u or p, not any file containing a u or a p. That is correct. You can fix by using egrep -v '^(u|p)$' – rjmunro Jan 09 '13 at 12:40
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Here is remove everything except these matches! ls | grep -v 'vuze\|progs' | xargs rm -rf – Nick Sep 25 '14 at 12:32

score 7 · Answer 7 · answered Jan 09 '13 at 22:34

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 ~.

answered Jan 09 '13 at 22:34

poolie

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score 5 · Answer 8 · answered Jan 08 '13 at 16:32

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GLOBIGNORE takes a colon-separated list

GLOBIGNORE=u:p
rm *

answered Jan 08 '13 at 16:32

W_Whalley

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This does not work on my shell (GNU bash 4.1.5(1)). Be sure to test it first with something a little less harmful than rm or in a testing directory! – user Jan 08 '13 at 20:09

score 3 · Answer 9 · answered Jan 08 '13 at 17:02

3

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.

answered Jan 08 '13 at 17:02

Bill K

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It reminded me the same thing. But temporarily moving out of folder may not be a good idea in the era of multitasking :) – Sedat Kapanoglu Jan 09 '13 at 09:18

score 3 · Answer 10 · edited Jan 08 '13 at 18:00

3

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

This will delete all files except u and p in unix

edited Jan 08 '13 at 18:00

James Mertz

26,344

answered Jan 08 '13 at 17:58

user1803687

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score 2 · Answer 11 · answered Sep 11 '16 at 02:33

2

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.

answered Sep 11 '16 at 02:33

Renzo Fabián

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score 2 · Answer 12 · edited Jan 09 '13 at 03:57

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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

edited Jan 09 '13 at 03:57

aidan

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answered Jan 08 '13 at 18:16

sparkie

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You need to specify a directory before the expression (`find . -regextype ...). – Matteo Jan 09 '13 at 09:25
-regextype will only work on GNU versions – Matteo Jan 09 '13 at 09:26
no - my find version (debian squeeze) does definitively not require an explicit directory before the expression if the current directory should be used – sparkie Jan 09 '13 at 09:44
@sparke: this just works on GNU implementations – Matteo Jan 09 '13 at 09:48
@sparkie: not defining the directory (first parameter) for find is a GNU extension of find command. The same applies for -regextype option. In addition, your command will delete files in subdirectories, too, whereas the original question clearly asked about files in a directory. – Mikko Rantalainen Sep 04 '15 at 05:28

score 2 · Answer 13 · answered Sep 24 '14 at 03:05

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.

score 2 · Answer 14 · answered Oct 22 '14 at 12:37

2

Here's another variant. You can type:

rm -i *

or:

rm --interactive *

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

answered Oct 22 '14 at 12:37

idzikovsky

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score 1 · Answer 15 · answered Jan 09 '13 at 20:54

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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]*

answered Jan 09 '13 at 20:54

J Baron

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score 1 · Answer 16 · answered Apr 01 '13 at 12:44

1

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.

answered Apr 01 '13 at 12:44

sebhofer

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score 1 · Answer 17 · answered Oct 22 '13 at 07:06

1

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

answered Oct 22 '13 at 07:06

talloaktrees

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It would be better to use rmdir tmp in that last line instead of rm -r tmp -- that way, if previous command failed for any reason or was mistyped, you won't lose all your data. – Matija Nalis Jun 04 '23 at 23:17

How to delete all files in a directory except some?

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