Delete Folder That Contain Subfolders and Files on Linux

Delete folder that contain subfolders and files on linux

You need to delete that folder recursively,

rm -r folder-name

From rm --help,

-r, -R, --recursive   remove directories and their contents recursively

how to remove file from folder and subfolder single command linux

You can use "find" command with "delete" option. This will remove files with specified name in current directory and sub directories.

find . -name "http.log2019*" -delete

How to remove folders with a certain name

If the target directory is empty, use find, filter with only directories, filter by name, execute rmdir:

find . -type d -name a -exec rmdir {} \;

If you want to recursively delete its contents, replace -exec rmdir {} \; with -delete or -prune -exec rm -rf {} \;. Other answers include details about these versions, credit them too.

How to delete all files or Sub-folders (both) in a folder except 2 folders with shell script

You haven't specified which shell you're using, but if you're using bash then extended globs can help:

printf '%s\n' !(@(conf|foldername2)/)

If you're happy with the list of files and directories produced by that, then pass the same glob to rm -rf:

rm -rf !(@(conf|foldername2)/)

Inside a script, you may need to enable extglob using shopt -s extglob. Later, you can change -s to -u to unset the option.

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If you're using a different shell, then you can add some more options to your find command:

find  -maxdepth 1 ! -name 'conf' -a ! -name 'foldername2' -exec rm -rf {} +

Try it without the -exec part first to print the matches rather than deleting everything.

How to delete all subdirectories with a specific name

If find finds the correct directories at all, these should work:

find dir -type d -name "subdir1" -exec echo rm -rf {} \; 

or

find dir -type d -name "subdir1" -exec echo rm -rf {} +

(the echo is there for verifying the command hits the files you wanted, remove it to actually run the rm and remove the directories.)

Both piping to xargs and to while read have the downside that unusual file names will cause issues. Also, find -delete will only try to remove the directories themselves, not their contents. It will fail on any non-empty directories (but you should at least get errors).

With xargs, spaces separate words by default, so even file names with spaces will not work. read can deal with spaces, but in your command it's the unquoted expansion of $tar that splits the variable on spaces.

If your filenames don't have newlines or trailing spaces, this should work, too:

find ... | while read -r x ; do rm -rf "$x" ; done

How to delete files/subfolders in a specific directory at the command prompt in Windows

You can use this shell script to clean up the folder and files within C:\Temp source:

del /q "C:\Temp\*"
FOR /D %%p IN ("C:\Temp\*.*") DO rmdir "%%p" /s /q

Create a batch file (say, delete.bat) containing the above command. Go to the location where the delete.bat file is located and then run the command: delete.bat

Batch removing a sub folder in several parent folders

find . -name y -type d -exec sh -c '
  for d; do echo mv "$d"/* "$d"/..; echo rmdir "$d"; done' _ {} +

Remove the echos if the results look like what you expect.

How to delete a subfolder with only a single file under the parent folder

Considering all of the subfolders are in the same folder with no "sub-sub" depth, find command prints subfolders with this one-liner and bash handles the rest:

Sample folder and files:

$ find . 
.
./subfolder_1
./subfolder_1/file1
./subfolder_1/file2
./subfolder_1/file3
./subfolder_2
./subfolder_2/file4
./subfolder_3
./subfolder_3/file5
./subfolder_3/file6
./subfolder_4
./subfolder_5
./subfolder_5/file7
    

One liner to remove subfolders containing only one file:

$ find . -not -empty -type d -print0 | while read -d '' -r dir; do files=("$dir"/*); if((${#files[@]} == "1")); then rm -r $dir exit; fi; done

List of what is remained after removing

$ find . 
.
./subfolder_1
./subfolder_1/file1
./subfolder_1/file2
./subfolder_1/file3
./subfolder_3
./subfolder_3/file5
./subfolder_3/file6
./subfolder_4

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Extra

List of subfolders with the number of files included:

$ find . -not -empty -type d -print0 | while read -d '' -r dir; do files=("$dir"/*); printf "${#files[@]}  $dir\n"; done
    6  .
    3  ./subfolder_1
    1  ./subfolder_2
    2  ./subfolder_3
    1  ./subfolder_5

List of subfolders containing only one file:

$ find . -not -empty -type d -print0 | while read -d '' -r dir; do files=("$dir"/*); if((${#files[@]} == "1")); then printf "${#files[@]}  $dir\n" exit; fi; done
1  ./subfolder_2
1  ./subfolder_5

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