Deleting files and folders

Sometimes you would need to remove a file or a folder from the system. To do so using SSH, you would need to execute the appropriate command – rm.

The command in its simpliest form looks like:

rm myFile.txt myFile1.txt myFile2.txt …etc…

You would notice however that listing all files/folders that need to be deleted can be quite time consuming. Fortunately, rm accepts several arguments which can ease us. In the above example, we could type:

rm myFile*.txt

This will match all files starting with ‘myFile’ and ending in ‘.txt’

To delete a whole folder and its content recursively, you can use:

rm -rf foldername/

To delete all files/folders in the current directory, without deleting the directory itself, you would need to use:

rm -rf *

Please be very careful when using rm command, as it might have devastating effects on your website/server, should you delete a system file or a folder.