UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi All,

Is there an option for 'rm' to "remove everything but these files"?

For instance if I have:
a.txt <-- I just want to remove this one
a_1.txt
a_2.txt

Is there an option ? for this:
rm -? *_*.txt

Thanks,
ScKaSx

Might be something like this.

Code:

[orcl10gdb@SVRDELLD41 flexiSchema]$ ls -ltr *.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 orcl10gdb dba 0 Jan 16 09:28 a.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 orcl10gdb dba 0 Jan 16 09:30 a_1.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 orcl10gdb dba 0 Jan 16 09:30 a_2.txt
[orcl10gdb@SVRDELLD41 flexiSchema]$ rm -v a_[12].txt
removed `a_1.txt'
removed `a_2.txt'
[orcl10gdb@SVRDELLD41 flexiSchema]$ ls -ltr *.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 orcl10gdb dba 0 Jan 16 09:28 a.txt
[orcl10gdb@SVRDELLD41 flexiSchema]$

Raj

rajavu didn't you just remove the ones I wanted to keep? I wanted to remove a.txt and KEEP a_[12].txt.

The -v option is just verbose mode, which I thought might work at first as well (thinking of grep).

Cheers,
ScKaSx

Some shells allow some pattern matching sort of 'in reverse':

Code:

ls !(*.lis)

means ls every file that does not end in .lis You could apply this to your problem. However it really is VERY dangerous if you misuse it.

Code:

rm !(a.txt)

I can only second what jim said: applying such complicated logic is dangerous and it is very easy to get into "very deep kimchi" ((c) Neo). I would write a script which takes the filemask as parameter, displays the collection first and asks if this is acceptable, only then deleting it.code]



Having said this: if your shell doesn't support this reversal of matches you could use a find command, which sure does support reversal:

Code:

find . -type f -name "*txt" -exec rm -f {} \;

would delete every file ending in "txt" whereas:

Code:

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

would delete the complementary set.

I hope this helps.

bakunin