I think, like me, you would have faced a lot of situations, where you wanted to delete all the files or directories in a location, leaving only the required files/directories. So, I have a directory containing lots of files/directories and I want to delete most of them except some 5/10 of them, how to I do it.

I finally wrote a small script to do that. First save list of files that you do not want to delete in file called “listnames” and then execute the below script. This will give you the rm commands that you need to execute. If you want you can execute the rm command from the script, but to be able to review, I just have the commands echoed.

#!/bin/bash -
#===============================================================================
#
#          FILE: del_all_logs.sh
#
#         USAGE: ./del_all_logs.sh
#
#   DESCRIPTION:
#
#       OPTIONS: ---
#  REQUIREMENTS: ---
#          BUGS: ---
#         NOTES: ---
#        AUTHOR: Amit Agarwal (aka)
#      REVISION:  ---
#===============================================================================

all_runs=$(echo *)
while read line
do
    all_runs=$(echo $all_runs |sed 's/'"$line"'//')
done 
all_runs=$(echo $all_runs |sed 's/'"$0"'//')
all_runs=$(echo $all_runs |sed 's/'"listnames"'//')
echo rm -rf $all_runs

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