Linux – Delete all folders inside a folder except one with specific name

deletefindlinux

I need to delete all folders inside a folder using a daily script. The folder for that day needs to be left.

Folder 'myfolder' has 3 sub folder: 'test1', 'test2' and 'test3'
I need to delete all except 'test2'.

I am trying to match exact name here: 

find /home/myfolder -type d ! -name 'test2' | xargs rm -rf

OR

find /home/myfolder -type d ! -name 'test2' -delete

This command always tries to delete the main folder 'myfolder' also !
Is there a way to avoid this ?

Best Answer

This will delete all folders inside ./myfolder except that ./myfolder/test2 and all its contents will be preserved:

find ./myfolder -mindepth 1 ! -regex '^./myfolder/test2\(/.*\)?' -delete

How it works

  • find starts a find command.

  • ./myfolder tells find to start with the directory ./myfolder and its contents.

  • -mindepth 1 not to match ./myfolder itself, just the files and directories under it.

  • ! -regex '^./myfolder/test2\(/.*\)?' tells find to exclude (!) any file or directory matching the regular expression ^./myfolder/test2\(/.*\)?. ^ matches the start of the path name. The expression (/.*\)? matches either (a) a slash followed by anything or (b) nothing at all.

  • -delete tells find to delete the matching (that is, non-excluded) files.

Example

Consider a directory structure that looks like;

$ find ./myfolder
./myfolder
./myfolder/test1
./myfolder/test1/dir1
./myfolder/test1/dir1/test2
./myfolder/test1/dir1/test2/file4
./myfolder/test1/file1
./myfolder/test3
./myfolder/test3/file3
./myfolder/test2
./myfolder/test2/file2
./myfolder/test2/dir2

We can run the find command (without -delete) to see what it matches:

$ find ./myfolder -mindepth 1 ! -regex '^./myfolder/test2\(/.*\)?'
./myfolder/test1
./myfolder/test1/dir1
./myfolder/test1/dir1/test2
./myfolder/test1/dir1/test2/file4
./myfolder/test1/file1
./myfolder/test3
./myfolder/test3/file3

We can verify that this worked by looking at the files which remain:

$ find ./myfolder
./myfolder
./myfolder/test2
./myfolder/test2/file2
./myfolder/test2/dir2
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