How to remove files and directories quickly via terminal bash shell

Question

From terminal window     When I use the rm command it can only remove files  When I use the rmdir command it only removes empty folders     If I have a directory nested with files and folders within folders with files and so on  is there any way to delete all the files and folders without all the strenuous command typing     If it makes a difference  I am using the mac bash shell from terminal  not Microsoft DOS or linux

User · Answer

rm -rf     Would remove everything  folders  amp  files  in the current directory    But be careful  Only execute this command if you are absolutely sure  that you are in the right directory

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

So I was looking all over for a way to remove all files in a directory except for some directories  and files  I wanted to keep around  After much searching 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  Just wanted to put it out here in case someone else needed it

User · Answer

rm -rf some dir   -r  recursive  -f  force   suppress confirmation messages   Be careful

[file] How to remove files and directories quickly via terminal (bash shell)

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