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To remove a directory and all its contents, including any subdirectories and files, use the rm command with the recursive option, -r . Directories that are removed with the rmdir command cannot be recovered, nor can directories and their contents removed with the rm -r command.
Delete a Directory ( rm -r ) To delete (i.e. remove) a directory and all the sub-directories and files that it contains, navigate to its parent directory, and then use the command rm -r followed by the name of the directory you want to delete (e.g. rm -r directory-name ).
To delete multiple files at once, use the rm command followed by the file names separated by space. When using regular expansions, first list the files with the ls command so that you can see what files will be deleted before running the rm command.
rm -rf some_dir
-r "recursive" -f "force" (suppress confirmation messages)
Be careful!
rm -rf *
Would remove everything (folders & files) in the current directory.
But be careful! Only execute this command if you are absolutely sure, that you are in the right directory.
Yes, there is. The -r option tells rm to be recursive, and remove the entire file hierarchy rooted at its arguments; in other words, if given a directory, it will remove all of its contents and then perform what is effectively an rmdir.
The other two options you should know are -i and -f. -i stands for interactive; it makes rm prompt you before deleting each and every file. -f stands for force; it goes ahead and deletes everything without asking. -i is safer, but -f is faster; only use it if you're absolutely sure you're deleting the right thing. You can specify these with -r or not; it's an independent setting.
And as usual, you can combine switches: rm -r -i is just rm -ri, and rm -r -f is rm -rf.
Also note that what you're learning applies to bash on every Unix OS: OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. In fact, rm's syntax is the same in pretty much every shell on every Unix OS. OS X, under the hood, is really a BSD Unix system.
I was looking for a way to remove all files in a directory except for some directories, and files, I wanted to keep around. I devised a way to do it using find:
find -E . -regex './(dir1|dir2|dir3)' -and -type d -prune -o -print -exec rm -rf {} \;
Essentially it uses regex to select the directories to exclude from the results then removes the remaining files.
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