How To Remove Files And Directories In Linux

This article continues a series of articles about Linux shell and covers the three most useful ways to delete files and directories. We also covered exceptional cases like deleting directories with a massive number of files inside, deleting files or directories with special characters in their names. Improve your Linux skills in just 5 minutes.

“rmdir” command.

Before you use the rmdir command, you must know that you will not recover deleted objects back easily.

Now, open the command line terminal if you’re using Linux or macOS. If you’re using Windows, you may use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Before deleting the directory, let’s create it first:

$ mkdir /tmp/docs

Now, let’s delete it by the name /tmp/docs using the following command:

$ rmdir /tmp/docs

rmdir is a command for removing empty directories. It is quite useful, as you are protected from deleting something important from your file system.

Let’s validate this behavior by putting a file inside a directory, which we’d like to delete:

$ mkdir -p /tmp/docs

$ touch /tmp/docs/my_file

$ tree /tmp/docs

/tmp/docs
└── my_file

0 directories, 1 file

If your directory is not empty, you will receive the following error:

$ rmdir /tmp/docs
rmdir: /tmp/docs: Directory not empty

To delete the directory, which contains files, you need to use the rm command:

$ rm -rf /tmp/docs

Deleting several directories using wildcard.

All console commands in Linux can process files and folders using wildcards (*) in the file or folder name. Let’s delete the following folder structure:

$ tree /tmp/docs
/tmp/docs
├── dir1
├── dir2
└── dir3

3 directories, 0 files

To delete all directories, which begins from the dir we need to use the following command:

$ rmdir /tmp/docs/dir*

Here’s the expected outcome:

$ tree /tmp/docs
/tmp/docs

0 directories, 0 files

“rm” command.

The rm command is a general-purpose command which can delete not only directories but files too. But the default behavior of the rm command is not allowing you to delete any folders. You can use -r or -R arguments to delete directories, including the subdirectories.

Let’s imagine we have the following file system structure:

$ tree /tmp/docs
/tmp/docs
├── dir1
│   └── my_file1
├── dir2
│   └── my_file2
└── dir3
    └── my_file3

3 directories, 3 files

If you’d like to delete the /tmp/docs directory completely, use the following command:

$ rm -rf /tmp/docs

Where:

• -r – an attempt to remove all the subdirectories from a particular directory.
• -f – an attempt to remove the files without prior confirmation or permission.

/bin/rm: Argument list too long.

You may get this error message when you’re trying to delete a directory with many files. This error happens because the number of files provided to the rm command is larger than the system limit on the command line argument’s size.

The easiest way to delete such a folder is to use find command to delete all the files first, and then delete the directory itself:

$ find /tmp/docs -type f -delete

$ rm -r /tmp/docs

Here:

• /tmp/docs – directory for search.
• -type f – tells find utility to search files only.
• -delete – tells find utility to delete found results.

You may also create an empty folder and use rsync utility:

$ mkdir empty_dir

$ rsync -a --delete empty_dir/ /tmp/docs/

This is CPU consuming, but the fastest way to cleanup /tmp/docs directory.

“find” command.

The find command is a multi-purpose search command-line utility, which requires a separate article on its own, but in our case, we’ll use it to delete the folders.

Delete using pattern in the name.

Let’s delete all directories by the pattern dir* in nested directories names:

$ tree /tmp/docs
/tmp/docs
├── dir1
│   └── my_file1
├── dir2
│   └── my_file2
└── dir3
    └── my_file3

3 directories, 3 files

Use the following command to do that:

$ find /tmp/docs -type d -name 'dir*' -exec rm -rf {} +

$ tree /tmp/docs
/tmp/docs

0 directories, 0 files

Here, the find command will return all nested directories which name starts from the dir:

$ find /tmp/docs -type d -name 'dir*'
/tmp/docs/dir2
/tmp/docs/dir3
/tmp/docs/dir1

And then it executes the already familiar rm -rf command for every finding (that’s why we’re using {} + sequence).

Remove all empty directories in the folder structure.

In many cases, you may want to delete only empty folders within the folder structure. Let’s delete dir1 and other_dir from the following example:

$ tree /tmp/docs
/tmp/docs
├── dir1
├── dir2
│   └── my_file2
├── dir3
│   └── my_file3
└── other_dir

4 directories, 2 files

Here’s how to do that:

$ find /tmp/docs -type d -empty -delete

$ tree /tmp/docs
/tmp/docs
├── dir2
│   └── my_file2
└── dir3
    └── my_file3

2 directories, 2 files

Delete files with special characters (by inode).

If your directory name contains special character or consists of non-english words, then usual rm or rmdir command may not work for you. In that case, you can delete that directory by using its inode.

Inode – is an index node number which represents a file or directory on the file system.

You may find file or directory inode number using the following command:

$ ls -il /tmp/docs
total 0
8669007889 drwxr-xr-x  3 amaksimov  wheel  96 Dec  1 18:48 dir2
8669007891 drwxr-xr-x  3 amaksimov  wheel  96 Dec  1 18:46 dir3

In this example, dir2 folder has inode 8669007889 number.

Now, we can use this information to delete it:

$ find /tmp/docs -inum 8669007889 -exec rm -rf {} +

Here:

• -inum – tells find utility to search for the file system object with inode number 8669007889.
• -exec rm -rf – tells find utility to call rm with -rm arguments for every finding ({} +).

Summary.

In this article we described three ways of deleting directories in Linux. We also covered special cases like deleting huge folders or directories with special characters in their names.

We hope, you find this article useful. If yes, please, help us to spread it ro the world.

If you know any other interesting use-cases, which may be covered by the article, please, reach us our in the comments section below.