Removing all but 1 file and 1 directory in linux

Question

I want to delete all but 1 file and 1 directory from the directory I am currently in. How do I go about doing this?

I have a directory which has three directories a, b, c and three files 1.php, 2.php, 3.php. I want to remove directories a and b, as well as files 1.php and 2.php only. I am looking for a solution to doing this in an easier manner. I am looking for a solution that could be used on a higher scale with more folders and files.

Answer 1

find directory -not \( -name temp -o -name 3.php -o -name c -prune \) -delete

A quick test case showed that it worked on this exact case, at least. If there are subdirs named e.g. c or such, I believe you might exclude them as well. It's easy to get it to work in general cases, but to define a find command in all generality takes some testing.

Test without the "-delete" statement to see which files it matches.

PRESSTOP: find changes its behaviour when -delete is specified (find warns about this and won't go on when -prune is specified). You could always pipe output to xargs and rm, or write -execdir rm {} \; instead of -delete, though.

Examples:

find directory -not \( -name directory -o -name 3.php -o -name c -prune \) -execdir rm -r {} \;
find directory -not \( -name directory -o -name 3.php -o -name c -prune \) -print0 | xargs -0 rm -r

It's always tricky business, and when the goal is to delete files, make extensive test cases. I have quite a few similar finds running nightly, and I can't say I wasn't nervous setting them free :-)

Answer 2

My instinct is this - if you have just one file to save and one directory, copy those to a safe place then blow away the rest.

cp /dir/file.txt /safe/dir/
cp -R /dir/to/save /safe/dir/
rm -rf /dir/

Answer 3

Try the following script in pseudo perl:

#request the file you don't want to delete and store the name in a scalar variable.

opendir(DIRHANDLE, ".") || die "Could not open Directory handle.";
@list = readdir(DIRHANDLE);

foreach $name (@list) {
if($name != $your_input_variable) {
unlink($name); } else {
}
}