How to delete multiple files in S3 bucket with AWS CLI

Question

Suppose I have an S3 bucket named x.y.z

In this bucket, I have hundreds of files. But I only want to delete 2 files named purple.gif and worksheet.xlsx

Can I do this from the AWS command line tool with a single call to rm?

This did not work:

$ aws s3 rm s3://x.y.z/worksheet.xlsx s3://x.y.z/purple.gif
Unknown options: s3://x.y.z/purple.gif

From the manual, it doesn't seem like you can delete a list of files explicitly by name. Does anyone know a way to do it? I prefer not using the --recursive flag.

Answer 1

You can do this by providing an --exclude or --include argument multiple times. But, you'll have to use --recursive for this to work.

When there are multiple filters, remember that the order of the filter parameters is important. The rule is the filters that appear later in the command take precedence over filters that appear earlier in the command.

aws s3 rm s3://x.y.z/ --recursive --exclude "*" --include "purple.gif" --include "worksheet.xlsx"

Here, all files will be excluded from the command except for purple.gif and worksheet.xlsx.

If you're unsure, always try a --dryrun first and inspect which files will be deleted.

Source: Use of Exclude and Include Filters

Answer 2

s3 rm cannot delete multiple files, but you can use s3api delete-objects to achieve what you want here.

Example

aws s3api delete-objects --bucket x.y.z --delete '{"Objects":[{"Key":"worksheet.xlsx"},{"Key":"purple.gif"}]}'

Answer 3

Apparently aws s3 rm works only on individual files/objects.

Below is a bash command that constructs individual delete commands and then removes the objects one by one. Works with some success (might be bit slow, but works):

aws s3 ls s3://bucketname/foldername/ | 
awk {'print "aws s3 rm s3://bucketname/foldername/" $4'} | 
bash

The first two lines are meant to construct the "rm" commands and the 3rd line (bash) will execute them.

Note that you might face issues if your object names have spaces or funny characters. This is because "aws s3 ls" command won't list such objects (as of this writing)