Linux: Bash Delete All Files In Directory Except Few

I

‘m a new Linux system user. I need to cleanup in a download directory i.e. delete all files from ~/Downloads/ folders except the following types:

*.iso – All iso images files.

*.zip – All zip files.

How do I delete all file except some in bash shell on a Linux, OS X or Unix-like systems?

Bash shell supports rich file pattern matching such as follows:

• – Match any files.
• ? – Matches any single character in filenames.
• […] – Matches any one of the enclosed characters.
• Method #1: Say hello to extended pattern matching operators
• You need to use the extglob shell option using the shopt builtin command to use extended pattern matching operators such as:
• ?(pattern-list) – Matches zero or one occurrence of the given patterns.
• *(pattern-list) – Matches zero or more occurrences of the given patterns.
• +(pattern-list) – Matches one or more occurrences of the given patterns.
• @(pattern-list) – Matches one of the given patterns.
• !(pattern-list) – Matches anything except one of the given patterns.
• A pattern-list is nothing but a list of one or more patterns (filename) separated by a |. First, turn on extglob option:
• shopt -s extglob
• Bash remove all files except *.zip and *.iso files
• The rm command syntax is:
• ## Delete all file except file1 ##
• rm  !(file1)
• ## Delete all file except file1 and file2 ##
• rm  !(file1|file2)
• ## Delete all file except all zip files ##
• rm  !(*.zip)
• ## Delete all file except all zip and iso files ##
• rm  !(*.zip|*.iso)
• ## You set full path too ##
• rm /Users/vivek/!(*.zip|*.iso|*.mp3)
• ## Pass options ##
• rm [options]  !(*.zip|*.iso)
• rm -v  !(*.zip|*.iso)
• rm -f  !(*.zip|*.iso)
• rm -v -i  !(*.php)
• Finally, turn off extglob option:
• shopt -u extglob
• Method #2: Using bash GLOBIGNORE variable to remove all files except specific ones
• From the bash(1) page:
• A colon-separated list of patterns defining the set of filenames to be ignored by pathname expansion. If a filename matched by a pathname expansion pattern also matches one of the patterns in GLOBIGNORE, it is removed from the list of matches.
• To delete all files except zip and iso files, set GLOBIGNORE as follows:
• ## only works with BASH ##
• cd ~/Downloads/
• GLOBIGNORE=*.zip:*.iso
• rm -v *
• unset GLOBIGNORE
• Method #3: Find command to rm all files except zip and iso files
• If you are using tcsh/csh/sh/ksh or any other shell, try the following find command syntax on a Unix-like system to delete files:
• find /dir/ -type f -not -name  PATTERN  -delete
• OR
• ## deals with weird file names using xargs ##
• find /dir/ -type f -not -name  PATTERN  -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} rm {}
• find /dir/ -type f -not -name  PATTERN  -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} rm [options] {}
• To delete all files except php files in ~/sources/ directory, type:
• find ~/sources/ -type f -not -name  *.php  -delete
• OR
• find ~/sources/ -type f -not -name  *.php  -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} rm -v {}
• The syntax to delete all files except *.zip and *.iso is as follows:
• find . -type f -not \( -name  *zip  -or -name  *iso  \) -delete
• For more information see bash(1) and find(1).