Deleting all files in a folder except files X, Y, and Z

I have a lot of files and folders in a specific folder and I want to delete all of them; however, I wanted to keep files X, Y, and Z.

Is there a way I can do something like: rm * | but NOT grep | X or Y or Z

Answers:

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Method 1

Instead of using rm, it may be easier to use find. A command like this would delete everything except a file named exactly ‘file’

find . ! -name 'file' -delete

Many versions of should be able to support globbing and regular expression matching.

You could also pipe the output of find to rm as well

find . ! -name '*pattern*' -print0 | xargs --null rm

Method 2

Using zsh, with setopt EXTENDED_GLOB, using the ~ operator (except)

rm -- *~(x|y|z)

or ^ operator (negation):

rm -- ^(x|y|z)

But, you should probably instead move the files elsewhere, then delete everything. It’s far safer in terms of finger slips, such as hitting enter too soon.

Method 3

ls -1 | grep -v "^[XYZ]$" # | xargs rm -r

Attention: Run the command and if the files to be deleted are the right ones, run it again and delete the hash character “#”.

If the filenames are more complicated then that, do

ls -1 | egrep -v "^file1$|^filename2$|^f1le$" # | xargs rm -r

Again, first look at the results then remove the hash sign.

This version – as suggested in the comments – saves some characters and looks a bit clearer.

ls -1 | egrep -v "^(file1|filename2|f1le)$" # | xargs rm -r

Method 4

Later versions of bash have the extglob shell option that gives you a syntax for doing what you want (check your man page under “Pathname Expansion” to see if your installed version has it):

$ shopt -s extglob  # turn on extended globbing
$ rm !(X|Y|Z)

To test, I suggest you first replace rm with echo to see if the list of files to be deleted is what you expect.

Method 5

Move the files you want to keep away. Go up one level, delete the folder. Re-create the folder and move those files back.

Method 6

It will delete all (including hidden) except selected files/folders in the CURRENT directory.

find . -maxdepth 1 ! -name "file1.php" ! -name "file2.js" ! -name "dir1" ! -name "dir2" ! -name . -exec rm -r {} ;

Method 7

This is what I set up as a .sh script for an OSX/MacOS logout hook, works well enough.

#! /bin/bash
for dir in /PathToFolder/*
 do
    if [ ! "$dir" = "/PathToFolder/FolderToKeep1" ] && [ ! "$dir" = "/PathToFolder/FolderToKeep2" ] && [ ! "$dir" = "/PathToFolder/FolderToKeep3" ] && [ ! "$dir" = "/PathToFolder/FolderToKeep4" ] && [ ! "$dir" = "/PathToFolder/FolderToKeep5" ] && [ ! "$dir" = "/PathToFolder/FolderToKeep6" ] ; then 
      echo ${dir}
      sudo rm -R $dir user
      dscl . -delete $dir
    fi 
  done

exit 0

Method 8

With GNU-find you can use the -delete switch, which removes directories, if empty, too:

 find tmp -not -name X -not -name Y -not -name Z -delete

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