How to remove a bunch of files without a certain suffix

Question

I'm on Linux, using Bash.

I need to remove all files without a certain suffix, for example "dist". I know there are some tricks to do it, rather than removing all the unwanted files one by one.

Answer 1

Use the following to list all the files that would be removed (just to be sure):

find /path/to/directory -mindepth 1 ! -name "*dist"

Add -type f if you only want to delete regular files, not symbolic links or directories.

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Run the command with additional -delete argument at the end to remove them.

Answer 2

If you have extended globbing enabled, you can try:

rm !(*.dist)

Note: if you have directories without the .dist extension, this will will try and delete them too, but will fail.

To turn on extended globbing use: shopt -s extglob