I have to write a shell script which can delete all the files and directories recursively inside the specified directory but should not delete the specified directory.

Please some body help me in writing the script.

you can use -r option with rm command. Is this what you were looking for ?

- nilesh

i can not use rm -r *,So i want the similar functionality to be done by the script which will extract contents of a directory one at a time, and then check whether it is a file or directory then if it is a file it should delete it or if it is a directory it should loop through the directory and delete the contents in the similar way.

Algo
1) ls -r >> data file
2) counter =1
3) Now read line by line in while loop-- while ($ counter < no of lines in file)
if (test -f sed -n ${counter}p)
{ remove the file rm -f sed -n ${counter}p}