hi,
Does "rm" command has a option "--exclude"? I need to delete a butch of files exclude some files with .txt extension.
thanks!
jimmy

there's no --exclude option (see man page), though rm takes a list of arguments, so you can so something like:

rm `ls | grep -v 'txt$'`

-or-

rm `find . -type f | grep -v 'txt$'`

.. if you want to do it recursively.

... as with anything that deletes files permanently, use with caution.

great, thanks!

Another way of selecting files is using find with exec rm, something like
or close to that (refer to man page of find, if that doesn't work). Of course you can use any parameters find supports, to create the list of files to delete. Before actually removing, it's not a bad idea to run 'ls' instead of 'rm', for example, to have find print out the list it's going to work on, so you know what you're doing. Find is a nice tool for things like that, in addition to grep, xargs and such.

Yet another way, if your shell is bash and extglob is enabled (I'm sure other shells have things like it and more) is to do something like

I'm not very comfortable with that and it will try and fail to remove subdirectories, if any, but it's a possibility.

On the find, to follow along with b0uncer and to get closer to what you were asking, you could do

I'd leave in BrianK's '-type f' to avoid just that subdir problem and find can find negated expressions. (-execdir is just a bit of paranoia.) If recursing subdirs is a problem, there's '-maxdepth 1'. (A lot of these are GNUisms.)

Doesn't much matter, as you have your problem solved but it might be useful to others with similar issues.

Just wanted to add that I never knew you could throw a 'not' into the find command. Cool!