Remove all files/directories except for one file

Question

I have a directory containing a large number of files. I want to delete all files except for file.txt . How do I do this?

There are too many files to remove the unwanted ones individually and their names are too diverse to use * to remove them all except this one file.

Someone suggested using

rm !(file.txt)

But it doesn't work. It returns:

Badly placed ()'s 

My OS is Scientific Linux 6.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

POSIXly (without -delete, -mindepth etc.):

find . ! -name 'file.txt' -type f -exec rm -f {} +

will remove all regular files (recursively, including hidden ones) except any files called file.txt.

To remove directories, change -type f to -type d and add -r option to rm; care must be taken to avoid deleting any parent directory of the directory you want to keep (add at least ! -name .).

In bash, to use rm -- !(file.txt), you must enable extglob which enables a subset of ksh's extended glob operators including the !(...) negation one:

$ shopt -s extglob 
$ rm -- !(file.txt)

(or calling bash -O extglob)

Also enable the dotglob one to also remove hidden files.

With rm -- !(file.txt), since all the matching files are passed at once to rm, that can cause an Argument list too long error.

find's -exec ... {} + works around that by running rm as many times as necessary.

In ksh93, you can do the same with:

command -x rm -- !(file.txt)

In zsh, you can use ^ to negate pattern with extendedglob enabled:

$ setopt extendedglob
$ rm -- ^file.txt

or using the same syntax with ksh and bash with options ksh_glob and no_bare_glob_qual enabled (or emulate ksh for an even closer emulation of ksh's behaviour).

To work around the too many arguments issue, you can use its zargs autoloadable function.

To remove hidden files, add the D glob qualifier (or enable dotglob like in bash, but that would affect all globs like in bash). To remove only regular files, add the . qualifier. And use **/ for recursive globbing. So an equivalent of the first find command would look like:

autoload zargs
zargs ./**/*(D.oN) -- rm -f

(adding oN to skip sorting for an even closer match).

Answer 2

Another take in a different direction (iff there are no spaces, tabs, newlines, single quotes, double quotes or backslash characters¹ in file names), using -f so as to avoid the prompts that couldn't be answered as the input comes from either a pipe or /dev/null depending on the xargs implementation:

ls | grep -xvF file.txt | xargs rm -f --

or, with GNU parallel (not the parallel from moreutils), which would have problems with fewer characters² but means running one sh and one rm for each file:

ls | grep -xvF file.txt | PARALLEL_SHELL=sh parallel rm -f --

For arbitrary file names, on recent GNU systems and with a shell with support for Korn-style process substitution, leaving rm's stdin unaffected:

xargs -r0a <(ls --zero | grep -zxvF file.txt) rm --

Though we can also do without grep as GNU ls has a --ignore option to skip entries matching a pattern:

xargs -r0a <(ls --zero --ignore=file.txt) rm --

from man grep on a GNU system:

 -v, --invert-match
          Invert the sense of matching, to select non-matching lines.

 -F, --fixed-strings
          Interpret PATTERNS as fixed strings, not regular expressions.

 -x, --line-regexp
          Select  only  those  matches  that exactly match the
          whole line.  For a regular expression pattern,  this
          is   like   parenthesizing   the  pattern  and  then
          surrounding it with ^ and $.

 -z, --null-data
          Treat input and output data as sequences of lines, each
          terminated by a zero byte (the ASCII NUL character) instead
          of a newline.  Like the -Z or --null option, this option can
          be used with commands like sort -z to process arbitrary file
          names.

(-x, -v, -F are standard, the rest including the long forms of the standard options are GNU extensions).

Without the -x we'd keep my-file.txt as well and without -F, we'd also keep file-txt.

---

^{¹ and with some xargs implementations, possibly other blank characters as classified as such in the locale, and no file called _ and no file that can't be decoded as text in the locale.}

^{² Normally only newlines, but older versions of GNU parallel did not always properly quote all strings before passing to the shell so YMMV; we mitigate it here by forcing the shell to be sh with which the quoting is easier and syntax well known.}

Answer 3

Maintain a copy, delete everything, restore copy:

{   rm -rf *
    tar -x
} <<TAR
$(tar -c $one_file)
TAR

In one line:

{ rm -rf *; tar -x; } <<< $(tar -c $one_file)

But that requires a shell that supports here-strings.

Answer 4

you're all overthinking this.

cd ..
mv fulldir/file.txt /tmp/
rm -rf fulldir
mkdir fulldir
mv /tmp/file.txt fulldir/

Done.

EDIT Actually, easier:

cd ..
ln fulldir/file.txt ./
rm -rf fulldir
mkdir -p fulldir
mv file.txt fulldir/

Answer 5

On my Scientific Linux 6 OS this works:

shopt -s extglob
rm !(file.txt)

I also have Debian 32bit installed on a Virtual Machine. The above does not work but the following does:

find . -type f ! -name 'file.txt' -delete

Answer 6

I find that this approach is very simple, works, and doesn't require any special extensions (that I know of!)

ls --hide=file.txt | xargs -d '\n' rm

Answer 7

Use rm !("file.txt") instead of rm !(file.txt)

Answer 8

Just to give a different answer, you can use the default behavior of rm that it won't delete folders:

mkdir tmp && mv file.txt tmp  # create tmp dir and move files there
rm                            # delete all other files
mv tmp/* . && rm -rf tmp      # move all files back and delete tmp dir

Answer 9

In my case I needed to remove all files and folder except for zip files, inspired on accepted answer (I gave of course a +1), while from folder I want to clean all except zip files I use find . ! -name '*.zip' ! -name '.' ! -name '..' -exec rm -rf {} +, for example (all files/folders are empty since created just for the example):

my-computer:/tmp/toclean>ll
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 0 Oct  4 10:47 aaa.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 0 Oct  4 10:47 tata
drwxr-xr-x 1 user users 0 Oct  4 10:47 titi
drwxr-xr-x 1 user users 0 Oct  4 10:47 tutu
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 0 Oct  4 10:47 yoyo
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 0 Oct  4 10:47 zzz.zip
my-computer:/tmp/toclean>find . ! -name '*.zip' ! -name '.' ! -name '..'  -exec rm -rf {} +
my-computer:/tmp/toclean>ll
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 0 Oct  4 10:47 aaa.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 0 Oct  4 10:47 zzz.zip

Note I exclude '.' and '..' to just to avoid rm: refusing to remove '.' or '..' directory: skipping '.' message.

Answer 10

EZ.

mkdir -p empty_dir && rsync -av --exclude 'file.txt' --exclude 'folder/' --delete empty_dir/ ./

An empty directory is created where rsync transfers all files and directories except for the excluded ones, and deletes everything that was copied from the original location.

Make sure to put the trailing slash for folders as it matters to rsync.