[ale] delete all files but leave folder structure intact

Lightner, Jeff jlightner at water.com
Tue Apr 19 09:33:17 EDT 2011


Picky picky

Then don't ever do "rm -rf .*"

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
Geoffrey Myers
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2011 7:50 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] delete all files but leave folder structure intact

Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> Also be sure NEVER to do "rm .*" in any directory.   Many a newbie has
> surprised themselves by trying to remove .profile, .bashrc .mozilla
> etc... that way.

Pretty sure that's not going to work as since you're in the directory, 
you can't remove it.  Further, you can't remove a directory with 'rm' 
without the recursive option.


> 
> The ".*" will match ".." which is a hard link to the parent directory
so
> tells it to remove a directory above.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
> Michael B. Trausch
> Sent: Monday, April 18, 2011 3:46 PM
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [ale] delete all files but leave folder structure intact
> 
> On 04/18/2011 03:22 PM, Ed Cashin wrote:
>> To read into your question a bit, I'll assume you'd like to remove
>> special files and symbolic links and named fifos as well as regular
>> files.
>>
>>   find xyz ! -type d -print0 | xargs -0 rm
> 
> Nice.  I hadn't thought of that.
> 
> 	--- Mike
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-- 
Until later, Geoffrey

"I predict future happiness for America if they can prevent
the government from wasting the labors of the people under
the pretense of taking care of them."
- Thomas Jefferson
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