In Linux terminal, how to delete all files in a directory except one or two

Question

In a Linux terminal, how to delete all files from a folder except one or two?

For example.

I have 100 image files in a directory and one

Answer 1

From within the directory, list the files, filter out all not containing 'file-to-keep', and remove all files left on the list.

ls | grep -v 'file-to-keep' | xargs rm

To avoid issues with spaces in filenames (remember to never use spaces in filenames), use find and -0 option.

find 'path' -maxdepth 1 -not -name 'file-to-keep' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Or mixing both, use grep option -z to manage the -print0 names from find

Answer 2

In general, using an inverted pattern search with grep should do the job. As you didn't define any pattern, I'd just give you a general code example:

ls -1 | grep -v 'name_of_file_to_keep.txt' | xargs rm -f

The ls -1 lists one file per line, so that grep can search line by line. grep -v is the inverted flag. So any pattern matched will NOT be deleted.

For multiple files, you may use egrep:

ls -1 | grep -E -v 'not_file1.txt|not_file2.txt' | xargs rm -f

Update after question was updated: I assume you are willing to delete all files except files in the current folder that do not end with .txt. So this should work too:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -name "*.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;

Answer 3

Use the not modifier to remove file(s) or pattern(s) you don't want to delete, you can modify the 1 passed to -maxdepth to specify how many sub directories deep you want to delete files from

find . -maxdepth 1 -not -name "*.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;

You can also do:

find  -maxdepth 1 \! -name "*.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;

Answer 4

In bash, you can use:

$ shopt -s extglob  # Enable extended pattern matching features    
$ rm !(*.txt)       # Delete all files except .txt files

Answer 5

find supports a -delete option so you do not need to -exec. You can also pass multiple sets of -not -name somefile -not -name otherfile

user@host$ ls
1.txt 2.txt 3.txt 4.txt 5.txt 6.txt 7.txt 8.txt josh.pdf keepme

user@host$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -name keepme -not -name 8.txt -delete

user@host$ ls
8.txt  keepme