Let's say I have a directory tree like this:

FOLDER: file1 file2 file3 Subfolder1: file1 file2 Subfolder2: file1 file2

If I used rm -r FOLDER/*, everything in FOLDER would be deleted including sub-directories. How can I delete all files in FOLDER and in its sub-directories without deleting actual directories?

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3 Answers

What you're trying to do is recursive deletion. For that you need a recursive tool, such as find. 

find FOLDER -type f -delete
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With bash:

shopt -s globstar ## Enables recursive globbing for f in FOLDER/**/*; do [[ -f $f ]] && echo rm -- "$f"; done

Here iterating over the glob expanded filenames, and removing only files.

The above is dry-run, if satisfied with the changes to be made, remove echo for actual removal:

for f in FOLDER/**/*; do [[ -f $f ]] && rm -- "$f"; done

Finally, unset globstar:

shopt -u globstar

With zsh, leveraging glob qualifier:

echo -- FOLDER/**/*(.)

(.) is glob qualifier, that limits the glob expansions to just regular files.

The above will just print the file names, for actual removal:

rm -- FOLDER/**/*(.)
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If your version of find doesn't support -delete you can use the following to delete every file in the current directory and below.

find . ! -type d -exec rm '{}' \;
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