is there an option with rm that i can't find that will remove all files in a directory but one file type? say i have files in a directory

and i want to get rid of everything except the "txt" files

so i could do

but in psuedo code i'd like to do something like

i know this doesn't work. in ls there is an "I" option that might help, so maybe something like

but i'm missing something?

Tabitha

I would use the find command for that, like this:This will remove everything but files ending with .txt.
Short explanation: Find will look in the current directory (indicated py the parameter "."), withouth looking into subdirectories (-maxdepth 1) for files of the type file (no directories, option -type f) that have not a name that matches to "*.txt" (! -name "*.txt") and after assembling those filenames it will invoke rm to delete them (-exec rm '{}' +).
Looks complicated at first, but once you have grasped the concepts of find you don't want to miss that command.
For more info on find look at

close...

Or you can do it using find with -exec like Tobi suggested

Tabitha, actually there is something very similar to your pseudo-code, but you have to enable the extglob shell option:
Then you can use extended pattern matching to match anything except a given pattern:
This is documented here: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/man...ttern-Matching toward the end of the paragraph. Hope this helps.

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Is the shopt command Bash only? I get a "command not found" when trying that in zsh.

thanks guys!

Yes, it's a bash built-in. If I remember well in zsh you have setopt. Anyway, you can do
by default in zsh!

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Doesn't work here:EDIT: Nevermind, you are right, setopt is the command in zsh and I have to use it to set EXTENDED_GLOB for the rm command to work with ^.