How delete the content of a directory in Centos

Question

I need to delete all the content of a folder in Centos, but no the folder, for example I have a folder named MYFOLDER inside I have a lot of folders like FOLD_1, FOLD_2, FOLD_3, FOLD_4... etc , and some files like file_1.txt, file_2.log, etc, now that I need is delete all these folders and files, but no the container folder, this is the MYFOLDER folder, cause I need this directory to direct the results of a previous process.

I tried with the rm -rf command, but this delete the container folder too.

Answer 1

Delete the contents of the folder instead.

rm -r MYFOLDER/*

Answer 2

You can use:

rm -r MYFOLDER/{.[^.],.??*}

This deletes also the hidden files and folders. If you have too many files in the MYFOLDER directory, then you should run instead:

ls MYFOLDER/{.[^.],.??*}|xargs rm -r

Answer 3

The easiest way, in my opinion, is to delete the entire directory, including itself, and then recreate the folder. There are situations when this is not a good solution (such a unattended scripts or more complex pipelines), but you didn't specify why you didn't want to delete the folder.

rm -rf foldername
mkdir foldername

Oops. You did specify (i reread your post). Well,still, deleting and recreating can work. Especially if you chain commands together, like

rm -rf foldername && mkdir foldername

Or

rm -rf foldername; mkdir foldername

Answer 4

How about

cd MYFOLDER
find . | rm -rf

This deletes hidden files (the ones starting with a dot), too.