Unix Command to Delete all files in a directory but preserve the directory

Question

I am looking for a unix command to delete all files within a directory without deleting the directory itself. (note the directory does not contain subdirectories).

Answer 1

you can use rm -r /UrDir/*.* This would ignore the files in the sub-directories

Answer 2

If you want to Delete all file as well as all Directory that means all things then try this:

rm -rf *

Answer 3

If you are in the directory where you want to remove all the files then the following command works fine:

rm *

Answer 4

You can use find /path/to/your/folder/ -delete to delete everything within that folder.

While a wildcard rm would braek with too many files ("Argument list too long"), this works no matter how many files there are.

You can also make it delete only files but preserve any subdirectories:

find /path/to/your/folder/ -type f -delete

You could also specify any other criteria find supports to restrict the "results".

Answer 5

This will help you,

rm path/*

eg:

rm ../mydir/*

In this command,if mydir has any sub_directory! it'll raise error an message and skip that sub_directory and remove rest of the files in main directory.

Answer 6

you can remove all the files form the current directory using rm * if you want to remove from a specific directory, type rm /path/*

Answer 7

try

rm -r yourDirectory/*

it deletes all file inside the "yourdirectory" directory

Answer 8

rm -i <directory>/*

this should do the trick

EDIT: added -i just in case (safety first). directory should be a full or relative path (e.g. /tmp/foo or ../trash/stuffs)