I would like to clear out my /bin folder in my project directory. How can I do this?
I tried rm -rf ~/bin but no luck
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3 Answers
~ is a shorthand to a current user home directory. So unless it's also your project directory you are doing something wrong. Other than that, clearing a directory would be
rm -rf ~/bin/*
And if you also want to clear the hidden files
rm -rf ~/bin/* ~/bin/.[a-zA-Z0-9]*
Make sure you are not doing
rm -rf ~/bin/.*
especially as root as it will also try to delete the parent directory.
UPD
Why? Since wildcard (*) is interpreted by shell as zero or more characters of any kind the .* will also match . (current directory) and .. (parent directory).
Comments
You should say "... my bin folder", not "my /bin folder". /bin is an absolute path, bin is a relative path.
rm -rf ~/bin removes $HOME/bin, so not what you want either.
Now, it depends on where you are: if you are in your project directory when you type the command, just type rm -rf bin.
1 Comment
muon
is
-rf necessary? wouldn't rm ~/bin/* sufficerm -rf ~/bin/{*,.[^.]*}
would delete all files and directories in ~/bin/, including hidden ones (name starts with .), but not the parent directory (i.e. ..).
The .[^.]* matches all hidden files and directories whose name starts with a dot, the second char is NOT a dot, and with or without more chars.
1 Comment
Daniel
Totally works for me. I was using
{*,.*} but it shows an error message about directories .and ... The .[^.]* does the trick.