Question

On my computer running Ubuntu, I have a folder full of hundreds files all named “index.html.n” where n starts at one and continues upwards. Some of those files are actual html files, some are image files (png and jpg), and some of them are zip files.

My goal is to permanently remove every single file except the zip archives. I assume it’s some combination of rm and file, but I’m not sure of the exact syntax.

Answer 1

If it fits into your argument list and no filenames contain colon a simple pipe with xargs should do:

file * | grep -vi zip | cut -d: -f1 | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 rm