Ubuntu – How to delete sub-folders but keep all the files

You can do this on command line, using the -R switch (recursive) and then piping the output to a file thus:

ls -R > filename1

this will make a file called filename1 in the current directory, containing a full directory listing of the current directory and all of the sub-directories under it.

You can list directories other than the current one by specifying the full path eg:

ls -R /var > filename2

will list everything in and under /var and put the results in a file in the current directory called filename2. This works on directories owned by another user including root as long as you have read access for the directories.

You can also list directories you don't have access to such as /root with the use of the sudo command. eg:

sudo ls -R /root > filename3

Would list everything in /root, putting the results in a file called filename3 in the current directory. Since most Ubuntu systems have nothing in this directory filename3 will not contain anything, but it would work if it did.

rsync has an option called --exclude-from option which allows you to create a file containing a list of any files which you would like to exclude. You can update this file whenever you want to add a new exclusion, or remove an old one.

If you create the exclude file at /home/user/rsync_exclude the new command would be:

rsync -a --delete --exclude-from="/home/user/rsync_exclude" "${source_dir}" "${target_dir}"

When creating the exclude list file, you should put each exclusion rule on a separate line. The exclusions are relative to your source directory. If your /home/user/rsync_exclude file contained the following options:

secret_file
first_dir/subdir/*
second_dir/common_name.*

• Any file or directory called secret_file in your source directory will be excluded.
• Any files in ${source_dir}/first_dir/subdir will be excluded, but an empty version of subdir will be synced.
• Any files in ${source_dir}/second_dir with a prefix of common_name. will be ignored. So common_name.txt, common_name.jpg etc.