Question

i have this working code to delete files and folders from s3.
how would you delete using wildcard * ?

$s3 = new AmazonS3();

$bucket = 'mybucket';
$folder = 'myDirectory/*';// this doesnt work

$response = $s3->get_object_list($bucket, array(
   'prefix' => $folder
));

foreach ($response as $v) {
    $s3->delete_object($bucket, $v);
}

Answer 1

Presumably using wildcard * means you want to delete all objects at once rather than one at a time?

This is possible via delete_all_objects($bucket, $pcre), where $pcreis an optional Perl-Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) to filter the names against (default is PCRE_ALL, which is "/.*/i"), e.g.:

$s3 = new AmazonS3();
$response = $s3->delete_all_objects($bucket, "#myDirectory/.*#");

I’ve chosen # rather than the usual / as the pattern enclosing delimiter to avoid escaping (not a problem with the single slash here, but it get’s messy soon for more complex cases), see Delimiters for details.

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Implementation Note

Please note that deleting multiple objects had not been possible in the past at the Amazon S3 API level and simulated in the AWS SDK for PHP with a for loop within delete_all_objects() as well, i.e. it used one request per object still; fortunately, Amazon has finally introduced Amazon S3 – Multi-Object Delete in December 2011:

Amazon S3’s new Multi-Object Delete gives you the ability to
delete up to 1000 objects from an S3 bucket with a single request.

Support for S3 Multi Object Delete has been added to the AWS SDK for PHP shortly thereafter accordingly, see AWS SDK for PHP 1.4.8 “Zanarkand”:

The AmazonS3 class now allows you to delete multiple Amazon S3 objects
using a single HTTP request. This has been exposed as the
delete_objects() method, and the delete_all_objects() and
delete_all_object_versions() methods have been rewritten to leverage this new Amazon S3 feature.

An example for a dedicated multi-object delete (i.e. without wildcards) is shown as well:

$s3 = new AmazonS3();
$response = $s3->delete_objects($bucket, array(
    'objects' => array(
        array('Key' => 'file1.txt'),
        array('Key' => 'file2.txt'),
    )
));

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