How to remove Files and Directories in Linux
rm --help
Usage: rm [OPTION]... FILE..
To remove a file name just do
rm filename
Above command will remove the filename without asking unless you have the following alias set
alias rm='rm -i'
If you have the above alias, then it will ask you for the permissions as shown below.
rm filename
rm: remove regular file ‘filename’?
You can use -f switch to override the above behavior then, it will not ask for permissions even though you have alias set with -i option.
rm -f fielname
You can also remove more than one files by using following commands...
rm filename1 filename2 filename3
To remove all files with extension pdf
rm *.pdf
To remove the empty directory use
rm -d dirname
or use
rmdir dirname
If the directory is not empty; use rm -r
rm -r dirname
Above command will remove all the sub directories recursively.
If you dont specify the -f switch, it will prompt for permissions before deleting as shown below...
rm -r /tmp/*
zsh: sure you want to delete all the files in /tmp [yn]?
You can type y and Enter to delete. To suppress the above prompt. We can use -f swith as shown below.
rm -rf /tmp/
To remove multiple directories by name, we can do following...
rm -r dirname1 dirname2 dirname3