I want to write a short bash script to rm all files in a directory. I have a couple of directories that have too many files to use wild cards (!, returns a 'too many arguements error), which is hosing up my machine. So, I want to use a bash script that deletes them one at a time (perhaps a repeating loop that deletes the first file in the directory, the most recent file or whatever). My bash skills are negligible. Can anyone suggest a short script?

I posted something similar in the Newbie sections, which has a description of the more general problem.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...716#post103716

Thanks!

Perl or Pyhton could do this also. One algorithm would be:

1. Get a directory listing into an array or list.
2. Filter out any file you do not want deleted (namely . and ..)
3. iterate over the array and exec the rm command for each filename.

Pretty simple to do.

or just say

for i in *
do
rm -f $i
done

How about a cron job that "rm -rf /whatever/directory/you/want/whatever_wildcard_you_want*" every once in a while? Any ideas why this doesn't work? Why are you getting the "too many arguments" error?

I think the easiest would be:

cd /directory_to_clean && ls | xargs rm -f

I havent read your other thread but if I wanted to delete everything in a directory, I would use "rm -rf /dir" & that removes EVERYTHING in the /dir, the r switch tell's it to recursively travel through the directory & f tell's it to force so your not repeatedly asked , are you sure?

HTH

If you want to remove all file just do "rm -Rf *" and that will remove them all from the current directory recursively down.

If you want to decide on a file by file basis just add an "-i"

Hi ! keirobyn,
try something like this, hope it work out.

use -i switch with rm command with in loop. like this :
rm -i <file-name> or with wild card entries as follws in the script.

rm -i <directory-name>/*
it will propmt you each time before deleting a file and you can decide whether or not to delete that particular file.

bye
Dhananajaya

The whole point was that he couldn't use wildcards because he had to many files. So with or without the -i options it wouldn't work either way.
But this is a very old thread so I'm sure he's got his solution by now.