I have 30 folders, each with about 1700 files in them. I'd like to delete 500 files from each of these folders. What is the best way to do this using command prompt?
This question shows how to empty out files and this question shows how to do it in python but otherwise, there doesn't seem to be a way of deleting a specific number of files.
Let me know if you need any further information, thanks!
It's very easy to do in Linux. So you can download Git for Windows and run Linux commands in Windows. Please try this in a test folder/files first. You can not recover files once deleted.
Let's say you have 3 files (my-file-1.txt, my-file-2.txt, my-file-3.txt) in your directory. Then go to the directory and execute commands.
$ rm -rf my-file-1.txt # remove my-file-1.txt only
$ rm -rf my-file-1.txt my-file-3.txt # remove my-file-1 and 3
$ rm -rf my-file-{1,3}.txt # remove my-file-1 and 3
$ rm -rf *.txt # remove all txt files
$ rm -rf my-file-*.txt # remove all txt files begin with my-file
Related
1:Cannot Delete Directory
I'm using Linux Mint 20 Ulyana. I created a directory:
mkdir ./VM_Shared
It won't allow me to access or even see the directory in file explorer.
I can see it with:
ls -al
But it won't allow me to remove it:
sudo rm -dir VM_Shared - directory doesn't exist
sudo rm -dir ./VM_Shared - directory doesn't exist
sudo rm ./VM_Shared - is a directory
I also tried them without sudo.
I'm at a loss here. I cannot figure out why it won't let me delete it or access it.
This is basically recursively remove everything from root right?
Would this really delete everything on the device?
Do any operating systems have protections against running this – like a confirmation or something?
Seemed like a better idea to ask than to try.
The rm command means it is applied for removing file-folders based on the file path but as you have specified rm -rf / it tells to remove the files which are part of the root directory in the Linux or Unix based system, but again it will not do anything until and unless you apply the command with sudo access or super user do access with your system password.
Yes this would delete recursively.
Actually their is also a protection:
rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/'
rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe
rm -rf is a dangerouse command in linux.if rm -rf run with root privilage it force to delete all files and folders even hidden file and you must install os again. this command has not confirmation question.
As a security measure, you can set rm to always get you approved for the delete operation, it uses the "-i" option whenever you want to delete a file or directory. To make this command permanent, add the following alias to the $ HOME / .bashrc file.
When you run the rm command, it will run with the "-i" option by default. (If you use the "-f" option, these settings will be overwrite)
rm -rf
this code deletes all files on linux (system ,root files include)
this is very dangerous code
I used centos 6.5
in / path I have a lot of files that started with this name tmp_
I work with a user franco who has a limit permission ( and I can't add permission to this user )
and with FileZilla when I try to delete these files, I have a permission denied message.
so the solution is to delete these files with command in putty tool
because in putty, I can use command like this sudo rm .....
but I did not find the exact command.
I found this kind of command :
rm ./-tmp_
I want only to delete the files which are only in \ path and not in its subdirectories and which started with tmp_
I work with critical system so I want to be sure before execute any command.
To find target files use :
This will just print files on console.
find / -maxdepth 1 -type f -name 'tmp_*'
To remove files (not directories):
find / -maxdepth 1 -type f -name 'tmp_*' -exec rm -f {} \;
Please use -maxdepth attribute if you want to target files to specific depth.
The command "sudo rm -rf /tmp_" is worked if the /tmp_ directory not used for you.
I run wget to create a warc archive as follows:
$ wget --warc-file=/tmp/epfl --recursive --level=1 http://www.epfl.ch/
$ l -h /tmp/epfl.warc.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 david wheel 657K Sep 2 15:18 /tmp/epfl.warc.gz
$ find .
./www.epfl.ch/index.html
./www.epfl.ch/public/hp2013/css/homepage.70a623197f74.css
[...]
I only need the epfl.warc.gz file. How do I prevent wget to creating all the individual files?
I tried as follows:
$ wget --warc-file=/tmp/epfl --recursive --level=1 --output-document=/dev/null http://www.epfl.ch/
ERROR: -k or -r can be used together with -O only if outputting to a regular file.
tl;dr Add the options --delete-after and --no-directories.
Option --delete-after instructs wget to delete each downloaded file immediately after its download is complete. As a consequence, the maximum disk usage during execution will be the size of the WARC file plus the size of the single largest downloaded file.
Option --no-directories prevents wget from leaving behind a useless tree of empty directories. By default wget creates a directory tree that mirrors the one on the host, and downloads each file into the appropriate directory of the mirrored tree. wget does this even when the downloaded file is temporary due to --delete-after. To prevent that, use option --no-directories.
The below demonstrates the result, using your given example (slightly altered).
$ cd $(mktemp -d)
$ wget --delete-after --no-directories \
--warc-file=epfl --recursive --level=1 http://www.epfl.ch/
...
Total wall clock time: 12s
Downloaded: 22 files, 1.4M in 5.9s (239 KB/s)
$ ls -lhA
-rw-rw-r--. 1 chadv chadv 1.5M Aug 31 07:55 epfl.warc
If you forget to use --no-directories, you can easily clean up the tree of empty directories with find -type d -delete.
For individual files (without --recursive) the option -O /dev/null will make wget not to create a file for the output. For recursive fetches /dev/null is not accepted (don't know why). But why not just write all the output concatenated into one single file via -O tmpfile and delete this file afterwards?
xx#xx-PC ~/xampp/htdocs/sites
$ rmdir /s "yo-2"
rmdir: `/s': No such file or directory
rmdir: `yo-2': Directory not empty
xx#xx-PC ~/xampp/htdocs/sites
$ rmdir "yo-2"
rmdir: `yo-2': Directory not empty
I cant seem to get rmdir to work in git bash. Its not in a git repo and I've tried the above. Mkdir works as expected, why doesnt this?
rmdir will not work if directory is empty
Try
rm -rf yo-2
git-bash is a Linux like shell
If you are trying to remove an entire directory regardless of contents, you could use:
rm <dirname> -rf
just use the command below:
rm -rfv mydirectory
After trying out a couple of other commands, this worked for me:
rm dirname -rf
A bit late, but I believe it still can help someone with performance problems on Windows systems. It is REALLY FAST to delete on Windows using git bash comparing with just the ordinary rm -rf. The trick here is to move the file/directory to another random name in a temporary directory at the same drive (on Windows) or at the same partition (on *nix systems) and invoke the rm -rf command in background mode. At least you don't need to wait for a blocking IO task and OS will perform the deletion as soon it gets idle.
Depending on the system you are using you may need to install the realpath program (ie macOS). Another alternative is to write a bash portable function like in this post: bash/fish command to print absolute path to a file.
fast_rm() {
path=$(realpath $1) # getting the absolute path
echo $path
if [ -e $path ]; then
export TMPDIR="$(dirname $(mktemp -u))"
kernel=$(uname | awk '{print tolower($0)}')
# if windows, make sure to use the same drive
if [[ "${kernel}" == "mingw"* ]]; then # git bash
export TMPDIR=$(echo "${path}" | awk '{ print substr($0, 1, 2)"/temp"}')
if [ ! -e $TMPDIR ]; then mkdir -p $TMPDIR; fi
fi
if [ "${kernel}" == "darwin" ]; then MD5=md5; else MD5=md5sum; fi
rnd=$(echo $RANDOM | $MD5 | awk '{print $0}')
to_remove="${TMPDIR}/$(basename ${path})-${rnd}"
mv "${path}" "${to_remove}"
nohup rm -rf "${to_remove}" > /dev/null 2>&1 &
fi
}
# invoking the function
directory_or_file=./vo-2
fast_delete $directory_or_file
I have faced same issue. this is worked for me
rimraf is a Node.js package, which is the UNIX command rm -rf for node, so you will need to install Node.js which includes npm. Then you can run:
npm install -g rimraf
Then you can run rimraf from the command line.
rimraf directoryname
visit https://superuser.com/questions/78434/how-to-delete-directories-with-path-names-too-long-for-normal-delete
I found this solution because npm itself was causing this problem due to the way it nests dependencies.
Late reply, but for those who search a solution, for me the
rm <dirname> -rf
wasn't good, I always get the directory non-empty or path too long on node directories.
A really simple solution :
Move the directory you want to delete to the root of your disk (to shorten your path) and then you can delete it normally.