Commands using rm sorted by votes

Commands using rm (301)

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Remove current directory

CHANGELOG Version 1.1 removedir () { echo "You are about to delete the current directory $PWD Are you sure?"; read human; if [[ "$human" = "yes" ]]; then blah=$(echo "$PWD" | sed 's/ /\\ /g'); foo=$(basename "$blah"); rm -Rf ../$foo/ && cd ..; else echo "I'm watching you" | pv -qL 10; fi; } BUG FIX: Folders with spaces Version 1.0 removedir () { echo "You are about to delete the current directory $PWD Are you sure?"; read human; if [[ "$human" = "yes" ]]; then blah=`basename $PWD`; rm -Rf ../$blah/ && cd ..; else echo "I'm watching you" | pv -qL 10; fi; } BUG FIX: Hidden directories (.dotdirectory) Version 0.9 rmdir () { echo "You are about to delete the current directory $PWD. Are you sure?"; read human; if [[ "$human" = "yes" ]]; then blah=`basename $PWD`; rm -Rf ../$blah/ && cd ..; else echo "I'm watching you" | pv -qL 10; fi; } Removes current directory with recursive and force flags plus basic human check. When prompted type yes 1. [user@host ~]$ ls foo bar 2. [user@host ~]$ cd foo 3. [user@host foo]$ removedir 4. yes 5. rm -Rf foo/ 6. [user@host ~]$ 7. [user@host ~]$ ls bar Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
#### Use example ####
[user@host Downloads]$ wtzc http://raoulito.info/plugins/pidgin_screenshot/pidgin-sendscreenshot-0.6-3.tar.gz
[user@host pidgin-sendscreenshot-0.6-3]$ ls
aclocal.m4    config.h.in   INSTALL              m4           README
AUTHORS       config.sub    install-sh           Makefile.am  src
build-aux     configure     intltool-extract.in  Makefile.in  VERSION
ChangeLog     configure.ac  intltool-merge.in    missing
config        COPYING       intltool-update.in   NEWS
config.guess  depcomp       ltmain.sh            po
[user@host pidgin-sendscreenshot-0.6-3]$ removedir
You are about to delete the current directory /home/user/Downloads/pidgin-sendscreenshot-0.6-3/ Are you sure?
yes
[user@host Downloads]$
```
-2

removedir () { echo "Deleting the current directory $PWD Are you sure?"; read human; if [[ "$human" = "yes" ]]; then blah=$(echo "$PWD" | sed 's/ /\\ /g'); foo=$(basename "$blah"); rm -Rf ../$foo/ && cd ..; else echo "I'm watching you" | pv -qL 10; fi; }

oshazard · 2010-01-17 11:34:38 31
Recursively remove .svn directories

Recursively remove .svn directories from the current location.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

rm -rf `find . -name .svn`

jfcalvo · 2010-02-23 08:35:06 6
Download all files under http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/ to the current directory

I constantly need to work on my local computer, thus I need a way to download the codeigniter user guide, this is the wget way I figured.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

wget -r --no-parent http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/ ; mv codeigniter.com/user_guide/* . ; rm -rf codeigniter.com

jimthunderbird · 2010-03-01 02:37:26 3
Individually compress each file in a directory

Compresses each file individually, creating a $fileneame.tar.gz and removes the uncompressed version, usefull if you have lots of files and don't want 1 huge archive containing them all. you could replace ls with ls *.pdf to just perform the action on pdfs for example.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

ls | while read filename; do tar -czvf "$filename".tar.gz "$filename"; rm "$filename"; done

Thingymebob · 2010-03-29 08:10:38 8
Remove Thumbs.db files from folders

Shorter
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

rm -fr `find . -name Thumbs.db`

LrdShaper · 2010-08-18 03:27:05 5
remove OSX resource forks ._ files

Mac OSX creates resource forks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork) for every file, which are extremely annoying when transferring projects over to an Ubuntu server for instance
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

rm -f `find ./ | grep "\.\_.*"`

edfuh · 2010-11-16 20:52:33 6
recursive remove all htm files

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 sample output - yours may be different.
-2

rm **/*.htm

unixmonkey13930 · 2010-11-25 17:28:55 4
a simple bash one-liner to create php file and call php function

created and tested on: ProductName: Mac OS X ProductVersion: 10.6.5 BuildVersion: 10H574 Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
Uryyb Jbeyq
```
-2

echo '<?php echo str_rot13 ("Hello World") ?>' > hw.php && php hw.php && rm hw.php

IsraelTorres · 2011-01-04 21:15:19 3
Rename files in a directory in an edited list fashion

Instead of tedious manual mv commands and tabbing, this routine creates a file listing all the filenames in the PWD twice, edit the second instance on each line to the new name, then save the file, the routine does the rest. Feel free to replace nano with your holy war editor of choice. You will get a lot of "mv: 'x' and 'x' are the same file" warnings, these could be cleaned up but the routine works.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

ls > ls; paste ls ls > ren; nano ren; sed 's/^/mv /' ren|bash; rm ren ls

romulusnr · 2011-02-08 17:07:13 21
Delete all files from a locate output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

locate munin | xargs rm -r

strzel_a · 2011-03-14 11:47:00 4
Compress all .txt files to .txt.ta.gz and remove the original .txt
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

for i in "*.txt"; do tar -c -v -z -f $i.tar.gz "$i" && rm -v "$i"; done

Nichlas · 2011-06-25 20:39:06 5
Convert all the symbolic links in $PWD to copies of the referenced files
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

for FILE in `ls -1`; do if [ -L "$FILE" ]; then cp $(readlink "$FILE") ${FILE}_rf; rm -f $FILE; mv ${FILE}_rf "$FILE"; fi; done

unixmonkey1907 · 2012-01-16 16:39:41 6
grep files by date and delete

executed on SLES 11.2
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

ls -ltr |grep 'May 12'|awk '{print $9;}'|xargs rm -v

harpo · 2012-06-04 12:31:41 3
Remove .svn dirs

This is useful when you are uploading svn project files to a new git repo.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

find . -name ".svn" -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;

gigo6000 · 2012-08-16 13:04:47 5
Deleting / Ignoring tailer record from the file

sed '$ d' foo.txt.tmp ...deletes last line from the file
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

cp foo.txt foo.txt.tmp; sed '$ d' foo.txt.tmp > foo.txt; rm -f foo.txt.tmp

kaushalmehra · 2012-09-13 20:57:40 7
rm all files you grep

This command deletes all files in all subfolders if their name or path contains "deleteme". To dry-run the command without actually deleting files run: find . | grep deleteme | while read line; do echo rm $line; done
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

find . | grep deleteme | while read line; do rm $line; done

tec · 2009-02-18 00:55:57 8
Delete tens of thousans of files at one go

Deletes thousands of files at one go, I'm not able to recall the exact # of files that rm can delete at one go(apprx. around 7000.)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

rm -rf `ls | head -5000`

rockon · 2009-02-25 22:52:23 7
Removes Apple "garbage"

This is quite usefull in Unix system share via NFS or AppleTalk with OSX clients that like to populate your filesystem with these pesky files
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

find . -name *DS_Store -exec echo rm {} \;

dgomes · 2009-03-11 11:30:55 9
recursively delete .svn folders from a directory
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn`

crashrox · 2009-03-25 15:06:51 10
Recursive when needed

avoid rm to be recursive until you complete the command: put the -rf at the end!
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

rm strangedirs -rf

ioggstream · 2009-06-30 15:10:31 15
remove the last of all html files in a directory

plays with bash arrays. instead of storing the list of files in a temp file, this stores the list in ram, retrieves the last element in the array (the last html file), then removes it.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

a=($(ls *html)) && a=${a[$(expr ${#a[@]} - 1)]} && rm $a

linuxrawkstar · 2009-10-12 16:40:06 5
backup and remove files with access time older than 5 days.

This deals nicely with files having special characters in the file name (space ' or "). Parallel is from https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

tar -zcvpf backup_`date +"%Y%m%d_%H%M%S"`.tar.gz `find <target> -atime +5 -type f` 2> /dev/null | parallel -X rm -f

unixmonkey8046 · 2010-01-28 12:41:41 3
Remove all the files except abc in the directory

Remove all arquives except the list. Can't have space between the commas. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
$ ls
teste0  teste1  teste2  teste3  teste4  teste5  teste6  teste7  teste8  teste9
$ rm *[!teste0,teste1,teste2]
$ ls
teste0  teste1
```
-3

rm *[!teste0,teste1,teste2]

unixmonkey14106 · 2011-01-25 22:00:29 5
Download random gifs from gifbin.com

Download a bunch of random animated gifs from http://gifbin.com/
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

site="http://gifbin.com/"; for i in $(wget -qO- "$site"random| sed -r "s/^.*(bin\/.+\.gif).*$/\1/m" | grep "^bin"); do wget -c "$site$i"; filename=`basename $i`; [ `identify $filename | wc -l` -gt 1 ] || rm -f $filename; done

az · 2011-02-15 10:05:37 7
remove all files except *.txt
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

rm !(*.txt)

kev · 2011-07-02 13:22:23 4
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add a backup (or any other) suffix to a file

Very helpful when you've got complex filenames and needs to change just some small parts of it. Renaming a file called "i-made-a-small-typo-right-here" to "i-made-a-big-typo-right-here": $ mv -vi i-made-a-{small,big}-typo-right-here You could also copy multiple files, edit, remove, process, etc.

Backup all starred repositories from Github

delay execution of a command that needs lots of memory and CPU time until the resources are available

[ 2000 -ge "$(free -m | awk '/buffers.cache:/ {print $4}')" ] returns true if less than 2000 MB of RAM are available, so adjust this number to your needs. [ $(echo "$(uptime | awk '{print $10}' | sed -e 's/,$//' -e 's/,/./') >= $(grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo)" | bc) -eq 1 ] returns true if the current machine load is at least equal to the number of CPUs. If either of the tests returns true we wait 10 seconds and check again. If both tests return false, i.e. 2GB are available and machine load falls below number of CPUs, we start our command and save it's output in a text file. The ( ( ... ) & ) construct lets the command run in background even if we log out. See http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3115/ .

'hpc' in the box - starts a maximum of n compute commands modulo n controlled in parallel

the block of the loop is useful whenever you have huge junks of similar jobs, e.g., convert high res images to thumbnails, and make usage out of all the SMP power on your compute box without flooding the system. note: c is used as counter and the random sleep $ r=`echo $RANDOM%5 |bc`; echo "sleep $r"; sleep $r is just used as a dummy command.

Creates a 'path' command that always prints the full path to any file

The command creates an alias called 'path', so it's useful to add it to your .profile or .bash_profile. The path command then prints the full path of any file, directory, or list of files given. Soft links will be resolved to their true location. This is especially useful if you use scp often to copy files across systems. Now rather then using pwd to get a directory, and then doing a separate cut and paste to get a file's name, you can just type 'path file' and get the full path in one operation.

List all NPM global packages installed

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)

swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Have subversion ignore a file pattern in a directory

If you don't want to commit files to subversion, and don't want those file to show up when doing an "svn stat", this command is what you need

Parallel file downloading with wget

xargs can be used in this manner to download multiple files at a time, and xargs will in this case run 10 processes at a time and initiate a new one when the number running falls below 10.

Empty a file

The downside of output redirection is that you need permissions. So something like $ > file won't play nicely w/ sudo. You'd need to do something like $ bash -c '> file' instead, you could go w/ $ sudo truncate -s0 file

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Commands using rm (301)

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