Remove contents of directory but not the directory itself

[Ed Hon]

Is there a easy way of removing recursively all the files and subdirectories in a directory without removing the directory itself? For example, I want empty out everything in /dir without removing /dir itself. Thanks.

[Ken Hubnik_2]

cd to /dir
rm -rf *

[Tom Jackson]

Hi Ed:

rm /dir/*

You can use the -i option to confirm deletes.

Tom

[Shannon Petry]

For hidden files you will also need to remove the dot files.
I.E.
% rm /dir/.??*

or
% cd /dir
% rm -rf .??*

Notice that there are two place holders to ensure that neither "." nor ".." are removed, as that is the current and parent directories.

Regards,
Shannon

[Armin Feller]

# cd /dir
# rm -rf *

Regards ...
Armin

[RAC_1]

cd /dir
rm -fr *

[Paul Sperry]

cd /dir
rm -fr *

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Ed:

While:

# cd /dir
# rm /dir/*

...will accomplish what you seek in most cases, the shell's expansion of "*" may exceed ARG_MAX (see '/usr/include/limits.h').

To circumvent this, you could do:

# cd /dir
# find . \( -type d -a ! -name . \) -print|xargs rm -rf

Note that the current directory (".") is excluded.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Jochen Heuer]

A little easier:

$ cd /dir; rm -rf `ls -A`

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again) Ed:

Sorry, I dropped part:

# find . \( -type f -o \( -type d -a ! -name . \) \) -print|xargs rm -rf

Regards!

...JRF...

[Jochen Heuer]

Hi James,

I am not sure if 'find' is the appropriate command. What happens if there are symbolic links to a different directory? Wouldn't subdirs of this directory also removed?

[Jochen Heuer]

I hate to reply to myself, from man find (1):

DESCRIPTION
The find command recursively descends the directory hierarchy for each
path name in pathname_list (that is, one or more path names) seeking
files that match a Boolean expression written in the primaries given
below. By default, find does not follow symbolic links.