Commands tagged rm

Vote this down.

To prevent accidental deleting of files you can disable rm with this alias. Then use the trash command from trash-cli instead.

You could do the following, however, brace expansion with {} is not defined in POSIX, and therefore not guaranteed to work in all shells. But, if it does, it's more convenient (although it's certainly not less typing):

Sometimes there are times when I need to cp(1), mv(1) or rm(1) files recursively, but don't want to traverse the previous directory by following ../../../../ etc out of the current directory. This command prevents that. The secret sauce is ".??*". The file globbing ensures that it must start with a dot, and be followed by at least two characters. So, three characters must exist in the filename, which eliminates "." and "..".

Sometimes you unzip a file that has no root folder and it spews files all over the place. This will clean up all of those files by deleting them.

It does not work without the verbose mode (-v is important)

rm -rf .* matches ".." and thus one goes up a level and wipes out more than intended.

In bash, .??* safely accomplishes what one intends - remove those .files

The ? matches most characters except "/", thus .?? does not match ../ and so one is safe.

Remove all arquives except the list.

Can't have space between the commas.

Bash method to remove all files but "abc".

It would be 'rm *~abc' in Zsh.

-depth argument will cause find to do a "depth first" tree search, this will eliminate the "No such file or directory" error messages

expands through shell and not find

but may hits the limit of max argument size for rm

(thus: for f in **/*.htm;do rm $f;done

but then I prefer the find command ;)

This is for zsh with extended globbing.

An alternative which uses the advanced zsh globbing (pattern matching)

Really, you deserve whatever happens if you have a whitespace character in a file name, but this has a small safety net. The truly paranoid will use '-i'.

Please be careful while executing the following command as you don?t want

to delete the files by mistake. The best practice is to execute the same

command with ls ?l to make sure you know which files will get deleted when

you execute the command with rm.

This will search all directories and ignore the CVS ones. Then it will search all files in the resulting directories and act on them.

This is a slight variation of an existing submission, but uses regular expression to look for files instead. This makes it vastly more versatile, and one can easily verify the files to be kept by running ls | egrep "[REGULAR EXPRESSION]"