Question

I need to remove all the files in the current directory except one file, say abc.txt. Is there any command to rm all the other files in the directory except abc.txt?

Answer 1

If you’re after a succinct command, then with extended globbing in bash, you should be able to use:

rm !(abc.txt)

There are however several caveats to this approach.

1. This will run rm on all entries in the directory (apart from “abc.txt”) and this includes subdirectories. You will therefore end up with the “cannot remove directory” error if subdirs exist. If this is the case, use find instead:

   find . -maxdepth 1 -type f \! -name "abc.txt" -exec rm {} \;
   # omit -maxdepth 1 if you also want to delete files within subdirectories.
   

2. If !(abc.txt) returns a very long list of files, you will potentially get the infamous “argument list too long” error. Again, find would be the solution to this issue.

3. rm !(abc.txt) will fail if the directory is empty or if abc.txt is the only file. Example:

   [me@home]$ ls
   abc.txt
   [me@home]$ rm !(abc.txt)
   rm: cannot remove `!(abc.txt)': No such file or directory
   

   You can workaround this using nullglob, but it can often be cleaner to simply use find. To illustrate, a possible workaround would be:

   shopt -s nullglob
   F=(!(abc.txt)); if [ ${#F[*]} -gt 0 ]; then rm !(abc.txt); fi  # not pretty