How exclude files / folders for remove [duplicate]

Question

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How to exclude a directory in find . command (38 answers)

Closed 6 years ago.

How can I remove all in folder and exclude specific folders and files?

(As example with tar: tar --exclude="folder").

Edit: I can delete files and folders.

Answer 1

NOTE: Be careful running the following commands.

find . -type 'f' | grep -v "NameToExclude" | xargs rm 
find . -type 'd' | grep -v "NameToExclude" | xargs rmdir

Answer 2

The rm function does not have an exclude function. Instead you can use rm *.txt to delete only text files, rm *.pdf to delete only PDF files, rm a* to delete only files starting with the letter a, rm *d to delete only files ending with the letter d, etc.

Using this method, you can relatively quickly delete all the files except the ones you don't want to.