How do I delete folders using regex from Linux terminal

Question

Say I have folders:

img1/
img2/

How do I delete those folders using regex from Linux terminal, that matches everything starts with img?

Ruthy

For the record, the shell's glob wildcard expressions are not proper regular expressions. – Hatchel

Answer 1

Use find to filter directories

$ find . -type d -name "img*" -exec rm -rf {} \;

As it was mentioned in a comments this is using shell globs not regexs. If you want regex

$ find . -type d -regex "\./img.*" -exec rm -rf {} \;

Pariah

one way to improve this could consist in adding -maxdepth 1 to find like that find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -regex "\./img.*" -exec rm -rf {} \; it will be faster. – Substantial

I used your command quite a lot to clean the old backups on our production servers, but I can't figure out a regex to get all folders except the first of the month (means I want to wipe out every backup folder except 1 for each month). The folders name are defined like this: "yyyy.mm.dd.hh.MM.ss" (ex: 2016.07.29.03.00.19). Even find . -type d -regex "\./2016\.*" does not return anything ... any idea? – Bolection

try find . -type d -regex ".*/2016.*" – Pariah

{} is replaced by the file name and \; marks the end of the command passed to exec (if you don't escape it it would be taken by the shell) – Pariah

Other discussions also mention $ find . -type d -regex "^\./img.*$" -exec rm -rf {} + – Perigynous

Answer 2

you could use

rm -r img*

that should delete all files and directories in the current working directory starting with img

EDIT:

to remove only directories in the current working directory starting with img

rm -r img*/

Awildaawkward

this will also delete any file that will match the expression, this command delete everything that match the expression, not only directories. – Substantial

the OP says 'that matches everything starts with img?' – Awildaawkward

If name must start img you should use ^img.*. Without ^ character name may have img for example on the middle. – Proponent

as my solution was not using full regex just shell glob wildcard, as mentioned in other comment, that doesnt happen in this case – Awildaawkward

Answer 3

In the process of looking for how to use regexps to delete specific files inside a directory I stumbled across this post and another one by Mahmoud Mustafa: http://mah.moud.info/delete-files-or-directories-linux

This code will delete anything including four consecutive digits in 0-9, in my case folders with months and dates ranging from Jan2002 - Jan2014:

rm -fr `ls | grep -E [0-9]{4}`

Hope that helps anyone out there looking around for how to delete individual files instead of folders.

Planchette