In Unix how do you remove everything in the current directory and below it

Question

I know this will delete everything in a subdirectory and below it   rm -rf  lt subdir-name gt    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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

rm  -rf      Don t do it  It s dangerous  MAKE SURE YOU RE IN THE RIGHT DIRECTORY

User · Answer

make sure you are in the correct directory   rm -rf

User · Answer

This simplest safe  amp  general solution is probably   find -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -print0   xargs -0 rm -rf

User · Answer

Practice safe computing   Simply go up one level in the hierarchy and don t use a wildcard expression   cd     rm -rf --  lt dir-to-remove gt    The two dashes -- tell rm that  lt dir-to-remove gt  is not a command-line option  even when it begins with a dash

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

How about   rm -rf    pwd -P

User · Answer

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  lt name-of-directory gt  -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

User · Answer

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

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

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