I want to remove all the folders and files but except one. I have a Ubuntu server and I tried several methods and none of them worked.
This is my folder structure.
app app/public app/public/uploads app/public/css app/models file.txt I want to keep the app/public/uploads and delete all other files and folders.
These are the methods I tried:
find . -maxdepth 1 ! -name 'public/uploads' ! -name '.*' | xargs rm -rf find . ! -name 'public/uploads' -type f -exec rm -f {} + I actually wanted to achieve a similar behaviour today. I'm wiring documentation for a C# library that I have written with DocFx and the files were generated inside the _site folder.
Now, in my particular case, I needed two things, a) to have a git repository inside the _site folder, and b) after each build I wanted to remove everything inside the _site folder except the .git folder and all its contents.
To simulate the behaviour lets see the following structure:
The goal is to remove all except .git/**
So first, what I did was to write a find . command and see what I'm getting:
Then I wrote find . -mindepth 1 -not -regex "^\./\.git.*" to exclude the .git folder and all its contents:
Now that I'm happy with the results, all I had to do is to pass the -delete flag to my find command, resulting in find . -mindepth 1 -not -regex "^\./\.git.*" -delete:
In case you find command does not support -delete flag, then you can achieve the same result with find . -mindepth 1 -not -regex "^\./\.git.*" -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} rm -rf {}
Be warned, don't use `-delete` or `-print0 | xargs -0 -I {} rm -rf {}` if you first don't verify that the output you are getting from `find` command matches your expectations, otherwise, you will lose data. For my case though, I want to run the command outside of the _site folder; thus, my final command looks like so:
find ./_site -mindepth 1 -not -regex "^\.\/_site\/\.git.*" -delete
That could also work: find ./_site -mindepth 1 -not -regex "^.*\/.git.*" -delete, but it would also preserve any .git folder you may have in any subfolder of the folder you want to clean up.
I hope it helps!
Cheers!
You can do this by using the command rm -r !(app/public/uploads). Let me know if this works.
