Delete contents but not directory in Linux?

Question

How do you delete all content of directory but not delete the directory itself in Linux command line terminal?

Answer 1

To remove everything under $your_dir/, including hidden files and directories, but without removing the $your_dir directory itself, you can use find :

find "$your_dir" -mindepth 1 -delete

An alternative with rm in Bash would be:

rm -rf "$your_dir"/{*,.[!.]*}

The second part in the curly braces ( .[!.]* ) takes care of hidden files which start with a dot, but only if they don't start with 2 dots. This avoids trying to remove . and .., but would still aslo remove a file named .x