Delete all sub-directories except one

Question

Suppose under the current directory, there are multiple sub-directories, and one is called A.

How to delete all sub-directories except A with Bash?

Answer 1

Bash has extended globbing (first test, then remove the echo):

shopt -s extglob
echo rm -rf !(A)

Answer 2

find -maxdepth 1 -type d -not -name A -not -name "." -exec rm -ir {} \;

Answer 3

Something like

find . -type d -not -name A -exec rm -ir {} \;

should do.

edit

It should really be

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -not -name A -exec rm -ir {} \;

to prevent find from recursing below A.

Answer 4

What about:

mv A /tmp/
rm * -rf
mv /tmp/A .

This avoids some of the "scariness" of a typo in the other commands.

Answer 5

i usually do this by working up an ls command that gets it right first. i'm not at a unix machine, but something like:

ls -lda "[^A]"

Once you get it right, pipe it to a command

ls -lda "[^A]" | xargs rm -rf

Feel free to edit above if I've got my regular expression wrong...

Answer 6

If you want to be more flexible but manual you can do:

ls > /tmp/foo
edit /tmp/foo as you like
xargs -a /tmp/foo rm -r

That way you can do general munging.

Answer 7

Here's one way. Be careful with this sort of thing, though, it's so powerful that it can only be used for good or evil...

find * -type d | grep -v "^A" | xargs rm -rf

Answer 8

Don't use find as some people have shown with -exec and rm without passing -print0 to find and -0 to xargs. It will get confused on file names with spaces or newlines:

$ mkdir 'foo foo'
$ mkdir foo$'\n'foo 
$ find . -type d -exec rm -ir {} \;
rm: cannot remove directory `.'
rm: remove directory `./foo\nfoo'? y
find: `./foo\nfoo': No such file or directory
rm: remove directory `./foo foo'? y
find: `./foo foo': No such file or directory

Instead use find -print0 with xargs -0 , '-exec command {} +', or -delete if your find supports it.

Answer 9

See also here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/862388/delete-all-files-directories-except-two-specific-directories