Delete files within all directories in a directory

Question

I recently needed to delete all the files within ~40 directories that were within a parent directory, without deleting the directories themselves. I ended up manually doing so, but is there a more efficient way of doing this? I.e., is there a linux command that can do this?

For a more clear picture of what I mean:

HomeDirectoryName --> subdirectoryName --> 4 simulation info files

I had the above path, except there are 40 subdirectories, each of which have he 4 simulation files. I needed to delete all the simulation info files without deleting the "subdirectoryName" directories.

It may not be possible, as I searched everywhere for about an hour before finally deciding to do it manually.

Answer 1

It's very simple with the find command - just use -type f to find only files and not directories

find /path/to/parent/directory -type f -delete

By default, find recurses into subdirectories, so will find all files in the tree from this point down.

Answer 2

from parent directory run

find -type f -exec rm {} \;

for removing each file individually, or alternatively

find -type f -exec rm {} +

to enqueue multiple files to rm at a time.

For python enthusiasts, here's another solution:

 python -c 'import os;[os.unlink(os.path.join(r,f)) for r,d,fs in os.walk(".") for f in fs]'

Answer 3

From the parent directory

rm */*

will remove the 160 simulation info files without removing the 40 directories that contain the files.

(It doesn't matter in this case, but it may be useful in the future to know that rm will never remove a directory unless you explicitly ask it to with with -r flag.)