Bash script to remove all files and directories except specific ones

Question

I am trying to write a very simple Bash shell script that will cd in a specific directory, it will remove all files and directories except some few selected ones and then cd

Answer 1

If you have a recent version of find, then use:

find . -not -regex "filename1|filename2|filename3" -print

Check the output and replace -print with -delete if it prints only the files that you really want to delete.

If your version of find doesn't support -delete, use -type f -exec rm "{}" \;

Note that this will only delete files. This is important: If you say to keep file x but that file is in a folder y, then it would ignore x only to delete it later with the whole folder y.

To get rid of all empty folders (and this preserving the files you want to keep):

find . -type d -empty -exec rmdir "{}" \;

(source: How to Find and Delete Empty Directories and Files in Unix)