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I am looking for a unix command to delete all files within a directory without deleting the directory itself. (note the directory does not contain subdirectories).
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To delete everything in a directory run: rm /path/to/dir/* To remove all sub-directories and files: rm -r /path/to/dir/* Let us see some examples of rm command to delete all files in a directory when using Linux operating systems. How to remove all the files in a directory?
First, if you look at the rm command man page ( man rm under most Unix) you notice that –r means "remove the contents of directories recursively". So, doing rm -r . alone would delete everything in the current directory and everything bellow it. In rm –rf . the added -f means "ignore nonexistent files, never prompt".
If you want to remove not only the sub-directories and files of it, but also the directory itself, omit -mindepth 1. Do it without the -delete to get a list of the things that will be removed.
To delete a specific file, you can use the command rm followed by the name of the file you want to delete (e.g. rm filename ). For example, you can delete the addresses. txt file under the home directory. How do you force delete a folder in Linux? Open the terminal application on Linux. The rmdir command removes empty directories only.
You can use find /path/to/your/folder/ -delete to delete everything within that folder.
While a wildcard rm would braek with too many files ("Argument list too long"), this works no matter how many files there are.
You can also make it delete only files but preserve any subdirectories:
find /path/to/your/folder/ -type f -delete
You could also specify any other criteria find supports to restrict the "results".
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try
rm -r yourDirectory/*
it deletes all file inside the "yourdirectory" directory
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rm -i <directory>/*
this should do the trick
EDIT: added -i just in case (safety first). directory should be a full or relative path (e.g. /tmp/foo or ../trash/stuffs)
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