I need to remove all files with .gif extension except one file with name say "filename.gif". What is the optimal way to go about doing this in terminal?
The command rm *.gif
removes all gif files including the file filename.gif
.
bashcommand line
I need to remove all files with .gif extension except one file with name say "filename.gif". What is the optimal way to go about doing this in terminal?
The command rm *.gif
removes all gif files including the file filename.gif
.
Best Answer
Here's the simple solution you should probably use:
There's nothing special about the
.keep
extension, this just makes it so that the filename temporarily doesn't end in.gif
.If you must not rename the file (and there are scripting situations where this is important):
Or you can write it shorter like this:
You may prefer to use
find
instead; it's very powerful, you might consider it more readable, and it better handles weird filenames with characters like*
in them.I've used the
-not
operator for readability, but if POSIX compliance is important--if you're not using GNU find, or if this is for a script you intend to redistribute to others or run on a variety of systems--you should use the!
operator instead:One handy thing about
find
is that you can easily modify the command for case-insensitivity, so that it finds and deletes files with extensions like.GIF
too:Please note that I've used
-iname
in place of-name
for the search pattern*.gif
but I have not used it forfilename.gif
. Presumably you know exactly what your file is called, and-iname
will match alternate capitalization not just in the extension, but anywhere in the filename.All these solutions only delete files residing immediately in the current directory. They don't delete files not contained in the current directory, and they don't delete files that reside in subdirectories of the current directory.
If you want to delete files everywhere contained within the current directory (that is, including in subdirectories, and in subdirectories of those subdirectories, and so forth--files contained within the current directory or any of its descendants), use
find
withoutmaxdepth -1
:Be careful with this!
You can also set other values with
-maxdepth
. For example, to delete files in the current directory and its children and grandchildren but not any deeper:Just make sure you never put
-delete
first, before the other expressions! You'll see I've always put-delete
at the end. If you put it at the beginning, it would be evaluated first, and all the files under.
(including files not ending in.gif
and files in deep sub-sub-sub...directories of.
) would be deleted!For more information, see the manual pages for
bash
andsh
and for the commands used in these examples:mv
,rm
,[
, and (especially)find
.