In Unix, how do you remove everything in the current directory and below it?

Question

I know this will delete everything in a subdirectory and below it:

rm -rf <subdir-name>

But how do you delete everything in the current directory as well as every subdirectory below it and the contents of all of those subdirectories?

Ahriman

This has to be a dupe: #551422 – Sideburns

Answer 1

Practice safe computing. Simply go up one level in the hierarchy and don't use a wildcard expression:

cd ..; rm -rf -- <dir-to-remove>

The two dashes -- tell rm that <dir-to-remove> is not a command-line option, even when it begins with a dash.

Neill

Because you are specifically matching a named directory and are thus less likely to delete something that you don't intend to delete. – Neill

True. I could see myself doing that pretty easily. – Ahriman

doesn't it delete the directory itself too? You have to do mkdir <dir-to-remove> afterwards. But then any hardlink referring to that directory will be a distinct directory afterwards. – Valentinvalentina

litb, I know I have a filesystem that allows hardlinks to directories, but I really doubt you have it too. – Apogeotropism

Agree. Note: "rm -rf ." would leave you in an undertimate state with no current directory. Unix abhors an indeterminate state. – Tuning

@Apogeotropism I have a filesystem that allows hardlinks to directories too; it's called HFS+ and anyone who is running Mac OS X 10.5 and higher has it too. – Reginareginald

@Joshua, I wasn't aware that i can't do directory hard-links in linux with ext3. But i just tried and it didn't let me do it. Good point dude :) – Valentinvalentina

To be extra safe, you need to make sure that rm doesn't interpret the directory name as an option: cd ..; rm -rf -- <dir-to-remove> – Gallup

finding this now after I just deleted EVERYTHING on my server. I'm new to unix, but have a background with DOS, and the syntax is a bit different so I made a mistake. I did "rm -rf /*" intending to delete everything in the current directory, but deleted everything in root. Rackspace is restoring us now. In the future I'll keep this advice and avoid wildcards! Thanks! – Elohim

@Yen, if you use rm ./ you might accidentally type rm . / which could be disaster. – Irmgardirmina

@MaxHodges I did something similar today on my MacBook. I accidentally did "sudo rm -R /" when trying to delete the current directory. I almost had a heart attack! Luckily, by the time I hit <CTRL> + C, it had only deleted applications A through E in /Applications. I was able to get them back easily using Pacifist and the OS X Install disk. Whew... – Pot

hmm...i thought he wanted to delete everything in the current directory, but not the directory itself...how do we do that? – Quandary

To make it even safer, wouldn't you want cd .. && rm.... && will not continue if the cd fails. ; will. – Esteresterase

Answer 2

Will delete all files/directories below the current one.

find -mindepth 1 -delete

If you want to do the same with another directory whose name you have, you can just name that

find <name-of-directory> -mindepth 1 -delete

If you want to remove not only the sub-directories and files of it, but also the directory itself, omit -mindepth 1. Do it without the -delete to get a list of the things that will be removed.

Valentinvalentina

I needed to delete all the files in sub-directories, but did not want to delete the sub-directories themselves. find <name-of-direcotry> -mindepth 2 -delete worked great! – Insane

You need -mindepth 1 if you are specifying a directory (find <name-of-directory> -mindepth 1 -delete). Otherwise Johannes is right it will not delete the current working directory (when using find -delete). – Charmine

IMO, this is the best answer, particularly in scripts. – Gesticulative

I tried: find -mindepth 1 -delete but i got illegal option -- m but it worked great when i removed the mindepth option find . -delete – Holzer

Answer 3

What I always do is type

rm -rf *

and then hit ESC-*, and bash will expand the * to an explicit list of files and directories in the current working directory.

The benefits are:

• I can review the list of files to delete before hitting ENTER.
• The command history will not contain "rm -rf *" with the wildcard intact, which might then be accidentally reused in the wrong place at the wrong time. Instead, the command history will have the actual file names in there.
• It has also become handy once or twice to answer "wait a second... which files did I just delete?". The file names are visible in the terminal scrollback buffer or the command history.

In fact, I like this so much that I've made it the default behavior for TAB with this line in .bashrc:

bind TAB:insert-completions

Shroyer

Missing -- in this answer? This approach is awesome overall I must say. – Constabulary

better way is run this with sudo – Arraign

Answer 4

Use

rm -rf *

Update: The . stands for current directory, but we cannot use this. The command seems to have explicit checks for . and ... Use the wildcard globbing instead. But this can be risky.

A safer version IMO is to use:

rm -ri * 

(this prompts you for confirmation before deleting every file/directory.)

Interrupter

"Can be risky" is wondefully laconic. – Bojorquez

When doing things like this, I've found a quick ls -r . first lets you see what you are going to delete. Useful to give a quick idea that you aren't going to delete the whole disk... – Emilia

Why is it riskier than rm -rf <subdir-name>? – Ahriman

@liw.fi: My .bashrc typically has this: alias rm="rm -i". – Interrupter

@Ahriman -- because if you do it in the wrong place you can get disastrous results. Using a specific name in the wrong place can only go wrong if the same subdirectory happens to exist there. – Neill

Is there any possibility that it follows ".." and tries to remove parent directories? Not that i would think it would, but i better don't try it out on my box. – Valentinvalentina

You cannot possibly delete the parent while residing in the child. – Interrupter

When I tried to run this command it failed, saying: rm: cannot remove .' or ..' – Ahriman

Then you are left with no other option but to use the * wildcard expression. – Interrupter

A long time ago, I read a wonderfully inspiring story of a "rm -rf *" executed in the root directory. The author caught it before it finished with /bin, and reconstructed the system using only commands late in the alphabet (the earlier ones having been deleted). – Nugget

@David: You're probably thinking about this story: ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html – Ulna

Missing -- in this answer? – Constabulary

Answer 5

It is correct that rm –rf . will remove everything in the current directly including any subdirectories and their content. The single dot (.) means the current directory. be carefull not to do rm -rf .. since the double dot (..) means the previous directory.

This being said, if you are like me and have multiple terminal windows open at the same time, you'd better be safe and use rm -ir . Lets look at the command arguments to understand why.

First, if you look at the rm command man page (man rm under most Unix) you notice that –r means "remove the contents of directories recursively". So, doing rm -r . alone would delete everything in the current directory and everything bellow it.

In rm –rf . the added -f means "ignore nonexistent files, never prompt". That command deletes all the files and directories in the current directory and never prompts you to confirm you really want to do that. -f is particularly dangerous if you run the command under a privilege user since you could delete the content of any directory without getting a chance to make sure that's really what you want.

On the otherhand, in rm -ri . the -i that replaces the -f means "prompt before any removal". This means you'll get a chance to say "oups! that's not what I want" before rm goes happily delete all your files.

In my early sysadmin days I did an rm -rf / on a system while logged with full privileges (root). The result was two days passed a restoring the system from backups. That's why I now employ rm -ri now.

Wold

Answer 6

How about:

rm -rf "$(pwd -P)"/* 

Gondar

jQuery is so powerful. – Eligibility

Answer 7

rm  -rf * 

Don't do it! It's dangerous! MAKE SURE YOU'RE IN THE RIGHT DIRECTORY!

Arillode

Answer 8

make sure you are in the correct directory

rm -rf *

Inflexible

This does not delete files or subdirectories whose name starts with a period. – Bojorquez

true. in my testing, neither does rm -rf . tvanfosson has the best solution IMO with his "cd ..; rm -rf <dir-to-remove>" – Inflexible

Answer 9

This simplest safe & general solution is probably:

find -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

Mycenaean

Answer 10

I believe this answer is better:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/12593/how-to-remove-all-the-files-in-a-directory

If your top-level directory is called images, then run rm -r images/*. This uses the shell glob operator * to run rm -r on every file or directory within images.

basically you go up one level, and then say delete everything inside X directory. This way you are still specifying what folder should have its content deleted, which is safer than just saying 'delete everything here", while preserving the original folder, (which sometimes you want to because you aren't allowed or just don't want to modify the folder's existing permissions)

Halliburton