Bash script to remove all files and directories except specific ones

Question

I am trying to write a very simple Bash shell script that will cd in a specific directory, it will remove all files and directories except some few selected ones and then cd

Answer 1

Two problems I can see right off the bat:

• The -rf argument to rm must come before the filenames
• The extglob specifiers !, (, | and ) should not be escaped with backslashes

Try this instead:

rm -rf !(filename1|filename2|filename3)

If it's still not working, remove the -f argument, and you'll get error messages about what's going wrong instead of silently suppressing them. To print out the name of each file removed, you can add the -v option as well.