Shell – How to Remove All Sub-Directories from a Directory

command linedirectoryrmshellwildcards

This question is kind of a phase II to the first question I posted at here

I have a directory that contains a bunch of sub-directories, .zip files, and other random files not contained within a sub-directory.

I'd like a command line script to remove all sub-directories from within the parent directory, but keep all zip files and loose files that don't belong to any sub-directories. All of the sub-directories have content, so I believe I'd need to force their deletion with the -f command.

So basically, a command that looks inside the parent directory (or the current directory), deletes all folders from within it, but keeps all other content and files that are not a folder or contained within a folder.

I understand that deleting items from the command line requires special care, but I have already taken all necessary precautions to back up remotely.

Best Answer

In BASH you can use the trailing slash (I think it should work in any POSIX shell):

rm -R -- */

Note the -- which separates options from arguments and allows one to remove entries starting with a hyphen - otherwise after expansion by the shell the entry name would be interpreted as an option by rm (the same holds for many other command line utilities).

Add the -f option if you don't want to be prompted for confirmation when deleting non-writeable files.

Note that by default, hidden directories (those whose name starts with .) will be left alone.

An important caveat: the expansion of */ will also include symlinks that eventually resolve to files of type directory. And depending on the rm implementation, rm -R -- thelink/ will either just delete the symlink, or (in most of them) delete the content of the linked directory recursively but not that directory itself nor the symlink.

If using zsh, a better approach would be to use a glob qualifier to select files of type directory only:

rm -R -- *(/) # or *(D/) to include hidden ones

or:

rm -R -- *(-/)

to include symlinks to directories (but because, this time, the expansion doesn't have trailing /s, it's the symlink only that is removed with all rm implementations).

With bash, AT&T ksh, yash or zsh you can do:

set -- */
rm -R -- "${@%/}"

to strip the trailing /.

Related Solutions

Ignore ‘cannot remove `dir`: Is a directory message

You can just throw away the error messages:

rm * 2>/dev/null

That'll throw away all errors. If you want to see other potential errors then we can do something more complicated:

rm * 2>&1 | grep -v 'cannot remove .*: Is a directory'

In this way other errors will still be logged.

Bash – Find list of directories one level deep from matching directory

Just add a -prune so that the found directories are not descended into:

find . -type d -path '*/wp-content/plugins/*' -prune -print

You need to quote that *wp-content/plugins/* as it's also a shell glob.

If you want only the directory names as opposed to their full path, with GNU find, you can replace the -print with -printf '%f\n' or assuming the file paths don't contain newline characters, pipe the output of the above command to awk -F / '{print $NF}' or sed 's|.*/||' (also assuming the file paths contain only valid characters).

With zsh:

printf '%s\n' **/wp-content/plugins/*(D/:t)

**/ is any level of subdirectories (feature originating in zsh in the early nighties, and now found in most other shells like ksh93, tcsh, fish, bash, yash though generally under some option), (/) to select only files of type directory, D to include hidden (dot) ones, :t to get the tail (file name).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ignore ‘cannot remove `dir`: Is a directory message

Bash – Find list of directories one level deep from matching directory

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