Linux – How to delete files within a directory and subdirectories but not the folders

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How do I delete files within a directory and subdirectories but not the folders?

I need to be able to do this on the Linux command line.

With rm?

Best Answer

Traditional `find`

Use find. It will find all files (i.e. not directories) in the current folder. If you want to make sure you don't delete the wrong stuff, call this first.

find . -type f

Then, you can use the exec option to do something with these files – in this case rming them.

find . -type f -exec rm {} \;

`find` piped into `xargs`

You can also use the find output to feed into xargs, which will take the file paths as arguments for a rm command.

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm

The -print0 option is necessary to avoid breaking things with filenames containing whitespace. Generally, don't use such a thing without this option, it's highly insecure.

GNU `find`

GNU find also has a delete option. This is way more efficient than the exec way, as it doesn't have to fork a new process with rm. It is also more secure when considering file paths.

find . -type f -delete

The GNU manual for find has a very extensive section on deleting files.

Related Solutions

Linux – How to recursively remove subdirectories and files, but not the first parent directory

The previous answer is almost correct. However, you shouldn't quote the shell glob characters if you want them to work. So, this is the command you're looking for:

rm -rf "/target/directory with spaces/"*

Note that the * is outside of the double quotes. This form would also work:

rm -rf /target/directory\ with\ spaces/*

If you have the * in quotes as shown above, then it will only attempt to remove the single file literally named * inside the target directory.

Windows – How to delete files and subdirectories from folder but not that folder itself

cd <foldername>
del *.*

will delete the files. You'll need to do

rmdir /s <subfolder>

for each subfolder.

Update

Try this in a batch file:

@echo off
cd "%1"
del *.* /y
for /d %%i in (*) do rmdir /s /q "%%i"

Call it something like EmptyDir.bat. Then you can type:

emptydir <dirname>

and it will delete the files and folder in that folder, but leave the folder there.

Best Answer

Traditional find

find piped into xargs

GNU find