Remove all Docker containers except one

Question

I have script that stops containers and then removes them

docker stop $(docker ps -q) docker rm $(docker ps -a -q) 

But I don't want to remove the docker container with name "my_docker".

How can I remove all containers except this one?

Answer 1

You can try this, which will

• Filter out the unwanted item (grep -v), and then
• returns the first column, which contains the container id

Run this command:

docker rm $(docker ps -a | grep -v "my_docker" | awk 'NR>1 {print $1}') 

To use cut instead of awk, try this:

docker rm $(docker ps -a | grep -v "my_docker" | cut -d ' ' -f1) 

Examples for awk/cut usage here: bash: shortest way to get n-th column of output

Answer 2

The title of the question asks for images, not containers. For those stumbling across this question looking to remove all images except one, you can use docker prune along with filter flags:

docker image prune -a --force --filter "label!=image_name" 

replacing image_name with the name of your image.

You can also use the "until=" flag to prune your images by date.