In linux, how to delete all files EXCEPT the pattern *.txt?

Question

I know how to delete all txt file under current directory by rm *.txt. Does anyone know how to delete all files in current directory EXCEPT txt file?

Answer 1

You can use find:

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

Or bash's extended globbing features:

shopt -s extglob
rm !(*.txt)

The entire *.txt glob should be negated to avoid matching on parts of file names (for example my.file.txt matches *.!(txt), but not !(*.txt)).

Or in zsh:

setopt extendedglob
rm *~*.txt(.)
#  ||     ^^^ Only plain files
#  ||^^^^^ files ending in ".txt"
#  | \Except
#   \Everything

Answer 2

If you just want to delete all files except '*.txt' then you can use the following command:

$ find . -type f ! -name "*.txt" -exec rm -rf {} \;

but if you also want to delete directories along with the files then you can use this:

$ find . ! -name "*.txt" -exec rm -r {} \;

Answer 3

there are many ways could do it. but the most simple way would be (bash):

shopt -s extglob
rm !(*.txt)

Answer 4

You can use inverted grep and xargs

ls | grep -v .txt$| xargs rm

Answer 5

One solution without find:

mv dir/*.txt otherdir/
rm -r dir
mv otherdir dir

This should work on all kind of shells.

Answer 6

Simply do:

rm $(ls -I "*.txt" ) #Deletes file type except *.txt

Likewise, if need to delete "except one or more file type", do:

rm $(ls -I "*.txt" -I "*.pdf" ) #Deletes file types except *.txt & *.pdf

Answer 7

This works also to remove all hidden (dot) files and folders except the stated one (.mydir):

rm -rf $(ls -aI ".mydir")

Answer 8

I made a modular bash function for this, based on a compilation of findings:

rmexcept()
{
    files=()
    for pattern in "$@"
    do
        files+=(`find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -iname "$pattern"`)
    done

    # filter for duplicates only when more than one pattern provided
    if (($# > 1))
    then
        printf "%s\n" ${files[@]} | sort | uniq -d | xargs rm
    else
        printf "%s\n" ${files[@]} | xargs rm
    fi
}

It is designed to work with multiple pattern arguments:

rmexcept '*.tex' '*.pdf'

NOTE: The single quotes are necessary! Otherwise bash will expand the wildcard and you will have a number of inputs equal to the matching expansion, which causes every file to eventually repeat, and thus, causes the function to delete everything!

If you don't want to remember this dangerous caveat (I don't), define rmexcept as follows:

rmexcept()
{
    files=()
    for pattern in "$@"
    do
        files+=(`find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -iname "*$pattern"`)
    done

    # filter for duplicates only when more than one pattern provided
    if (($# > 1))
    then
        printf "%s\n" ${files[@]} | sort | uniq -d | xargs rm
    else
        printf "%s\n" ${files[@]} | xargs rm
    fi
}

And use without wildcards:

rmexcept .tex .pdf

NOTE: You can still make a dangerous mistake by using a prefix *. I'll keep thinking about how to improve this.

---

The way I put the find results in an array might not be best practice. See this thread for more details.

Answer 9

ls |awk '!/\.txt$/{print "rm -rvf "$1}'| sh