Delete all files and folders recursively but excluding one folder

Question

I have a folder structure like this:

my-root-folder
├── .git
├── README.md
├── index.css
├── index.js
├── index.html
├── assets
│   ├── image
│   │   ├── logo.jpg
│   │   ├── header.jpg

i want delete all files and folder into my-root-folder but not the .git folder ( ./my-root-folder/.git ) and his child.

i have tried with this command, but always delete all:

shopt -s extglob && rm -rf ./* !(".git")

Side note i'm in a docker image based on alpine.

Answer 1

You can try with find :

find my-root-folder -mindepth 1 -not -path "*/.git*" -delete

Roughly translated, this means: find inside my-root-folder everything at least one level deep (so, exclude the folder itself) that does not match the predicate path contains "/.git" and delete it.

Note that the argument ".git" is actually a regular expression, so be careful when adapting to other situations. find is a very powerful and useful tool, so be sure to check out its documentation!

Answer 2

This find command delete nested .git as well :

find .  -mindepth 1 -path ./.git -prune -o -exec echo rm -rf {} \;

-path ./.git -prune -o excludes only top level .git

One drawback is you may see messages because find tries to access directories it has already deleted.

Remove echo once you are happy.