[bash] In Unix, how do you remove everything in the current directory and below it?

I know this will delete everything in a subdirectory and below it:

rm -rf <subdir-name>

But how do you delete everything in the current directory as well as every subdirectory below it and the contents of all of those subdirectories?

It is correct that rm –rf . will remove everything in the current directly including any subdirectories and their content. The single dot (.) means the current directory. be carefull not to do rm -rf .. since the double dot (..) means the previous directory.

This being said, if you are like me and have multiple terminal windows open at the same time, you'd better be safe and use rm -ir . Lets look at the command arguments to understand why.

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". That command deletes all the files and directories in the current directory and never prompts you to confirm you really want to do that. -f is particularly dangerous if you run the command under a privilege user since you could delete the content of any directory without getting a chance to make sure that's really what you want.

On the otherhand, in rm -ri . the -i that replaces the -f means "prompt before any removal". This means you'll get a chance to say "oups! that's not what I want" before rm goes happily delete all your files.

In my early sysadmin days I did an rm -rf / on a system while logged with full privileges (root). The result was two days passed a restoring the system from backups. That's why I now employ rm -ri now.

This simplest safe & general solution is probably:

find -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

make sure you are in the correct directory

rm -rf *

Use

rm -rf *

Update: The . stands for current directory, but we cannot use this. The command seems to have explicit checks for . and ... Use the wildcard globbing instead. But this can be risky.

A safer version IMO is to use:

rm -ri * 

(this prompts you for confirmation before deleting every file/directory.)

What I always do is type

rm -rf *

and then hit ESC-*, and bash will expand the * to an explicit list of files and directories in the current working directory.

The benefits are:

• I can review the list of files to delete before hitting ENTER.
• The command history will not contain "rm -rf *" with the wildcard intact, which might then be accidentally reused in the wrong place at the wrong time. Instead, the command history will have the actual file names in there.
• It has also become handy once or twice to answer "wait a second... which files did I just delete?". The file names are visible in the terminal scrollback buffer or the command history.

In fact, I like this so much that I've made it the default behavior for TAB with this line in .bashrc:

bind TAB:insert-completions

I believe this answer is better:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/12593/how-to-remove-all-the-files-in-a-directory

If your top-level directory is called images, then run rm -r images/*. This uses the shell glob operator * to run rm -r on every file or directory within images.

basically you go up one level, and then say delete everything inside X directory. This way you are still specifying what folder should have its content deleted, which is safer than just saying 'delete everything here", while preserving the original folder, (which sometimes you want to because you aren't allowed or just don't want to modify the folder's existing permissions)

How about:

rm -rf "$(pwd -P)"/* 

Will delete all files/directories below the current one.

find -mindepth 1 -delete

If you want to do the same with another directory whose name you have, you can just name that

find <name-of-directory> -mindepth 1 -delete

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.

rm  -rf * 

Don't do it! It's dangerous! MAKE SURE YOU'RE IN THE RIGHT DIRECTORY!