Linux Command to Delete All Files Except .Git Folder

Linux command to delete all files except .git folder?

Resetting the index is cheap, so

git rm -rf .
git clean -fxd

Then you can reset the index (with git reset) or go straight on to checking out a new branch.

Delete all files and folders recursively but excluding one folder

You can try with find:

find my-root-folder -mindepth 1 -not -path "*/.git*" -delete

Roughly translated, this means: find inside my-root-folder everything at least one level deep (so, exclude the folder itself) that does not match the predicate path contains "/.git" and delete it.

Note that the argument ".git" is actually a regular expression, so be careful when adapting to other situations. find is a very powerful and useful tool, so be sure to check out its documentation!

remove everything exept for .git directory and .gitignore on linux

You could run this:

find -mindepth 1 -depth -print0 | grep -vEzZ '(\.git(/|$)|/\.gitignore$)' | xargs -0 rm -rvf

But simulate first what it would do:

find -mindepth 1 -depth -print0 | grep -vEzZ '(\.git(/|$)|/\.gitignore$)' | xargs -0 echo rm -rvf

Explanation:

-mindepth 1 : it will exclude current directory

-depth : it will list files before folders

print0 : it will separate each records with a null character, handy if you file name contains spaces

Remove all except certain folders from git history

You are correct: a tree filter or an index filter would be the way to do this with git filter-branch.

The tree filter is easier, but much slower (easily 10 to 100 times slower). The way a tree filter works is that your supplied command is run in a temporary directory that contains all, and only, the files that were present in the original (now being copied) commit. Any files your command leaves behind, remain in the copied commit. Any files your command creates in the temporary directory, are also in the copied commit. (You may create or remove directories within the temporary directory with no effect either way, since Git stores only the files.) Hence, to remove everything except A and B, write a command that removes every file that is in something other than either A or B:

find . -name A -prune -o -name B -prune -o -print0 | xargs -0 rm

for instance.

The index filter is harder, but faster because Git does not have to copy all the files out to a file tree and then re-scan the file tree to build a new index, in order to copy the original commit. Instead, it provides only an index, which you can then manipulate with commands like git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch for instance, or git update-index for the most general case. But, now the only tools you have are those in Git that manipulate the index. There is no fancy Unix find command.

You do, of course, have git ls-files, which reads out the current contents of the index. Hence you can write a program in whatever language you like (I would use Python first here, probably, others might start with Perl) that in essence does:

for (all files in the index)
    if (file name starts with 'A/' or 'B/')
        do nothing
    else
        add to removal list
invoke "git rm --cached" on paths in removal list

If you are willing to trust that no file name has an embedded newline, the above can be done in regular shell as:

git ls-files | IFS=$'\n' while read path; do
    case "$path" in A/*|B/*) continue;; esac
    git rm --cached "$path"
done

which is not terribly efficient (one git rm --cached per path!) but should work "out of the box" as an --index-filter.

(Untested, but probably works and should be significantly more efficient: pipe git ls-files output through grep -v to remove desired files, and pipe grep output into git update-index --force-remove --stdin. This still assumes no newlines in path names.)

Remove all git files from a directory?

The .git folder is only stored in the root directory of the repo, not all the sub-directories like subversion. You should be able to just delete that one folder, unless you are using Submodules...then they will have one too.

How do you delete all hidden and non-hidden files except one?

This will delete everything in the current directory that you have permission to remove, recursively, preserving the file named by -path, and its parent path.

# remove all files bar one
find . -mindepth 1 -not -type d -not -path ./file/to/keep -exec rm -rf {} +

# then remove all empty directories
find . -mindepth 1 -type d -exec rmdir -p {} + 2>/dev/null

rmdir will get fed a lot of directories it's already removed (causing error messages). rmdir -p is POSIX. This would not work without -p.

You can keep more files with additional -path arguments, and/or glob patterns. The paths must match the starting point, i.e. ./.

Shell - Remove everything except a single folder

This is that simple as :

shopt -s extglob dotglob
rm -rf !(.git)

See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/glob

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