How to remove all files in a folder except just some specified files

command linefilesrm

I want to remove all files in a directory while leaving just some specified files, they don't have anything in common by name. How could I achieve that?

For example, the file names I want to keep are:

file_1.png, another_file.jpg, some_music.mp3

Best Answer

If you are using bash:

shopt -s extglob
rm -- !(file1|file2|file3)

The first line just activates extended pattern matching, and after that we use one of them:

!(pattern-list) matches anything except one of the given patterns

and the pattern-list is a list of one or more patterns separated by a |.

Or with zsh

setopt extendedglob
rm -- ^(file1|file2)

Or, more portable, using find:

find . -maxdepth 1 ! -name 'file1' ! -name 'file2' -type f -exec rm -v {} +

Related Solutions

Bash – Remove all files except for last file of each month

With the file zz containing the list of file names, this works, so just replace cat zz.

cat zz | grep -vF -f <(cat zz|sort -r|uniq -w11)

e.g. echo *.sql | grep -vF -f <( echo *.sql | sort -r | uniq -w11 ) | xargs rm

As is, it won't work if spaces in file names, and very fragile to filename length.

Bash – How to remove all files in a directory except hidden ones

By default bash doesn't glob dot-files, so to remove everything but hidden files in bash, using rm:

rm *

Sample output:

~/tmp$ ls -la
total 8
drwxrwxr-x  2 user user 4096 giu 11 20:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 21 user user 4096 giu 11 08:26 ..
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user    0 giu 11 20:00 .1
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user    0 giu 11 20:00 2
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user    0 giu 11 20:00 3
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user    0 giu 11 20:00 4
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user    0 giu 11 20:00 5
~/test$ rm *
~/tmp$ ls -la
total 8
drwxrwxr-x  2 user user 4096 giu 11 20:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 21 user user 4096 giu 11 08:26 ..
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user    0 giu 11 20:00 .1

To remove everything but .gitkeep in bash, enabling globbing for dot-files and using rm:

shopt -s dotglob
rm !(.gitkeep)

Sample output:

~/tmp$ ls -la
total 8
drwxrwxr-x  2 user user 4096 giu 11 20:19 .
drwxr-xr-x 21 user user 4096 giu 11 08:26 ..
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user    0 giu 11 20:19 1
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user    0 giu 11 20:19 2
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user    0 giu 11 20:19 3
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user    0 giu 11 20:19 4
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user    0 giu 11 20:19 5
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user    0 giu 11 20:19 .gitkeep
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user    0 giu 11 20:19 .hidden
~/tmp$ shopt -s dotglob
~/tmp$ rm !(.gitkeep)
rm: cannot remove ‘.’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove ‘..’: Is a directory
user@user-X550CL:~/tmp$ ls -la
total 8
drwxrwxr-x  2 user user 4096 giu 11 20:20 .
drwxr-xr-x 21 user user 4096 giu 11 08:26 ..
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user    0 giu 11 20:19 .gitkeep

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Remove all files except for last file of each month

Bash – How to remove all files in a directory except hidden ones

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