Removing folders with a space in name

[dennis89]

Good afternoon everyone,

I know that if you want to remove a single folder with a space in its name, you can do

rm -rf "Test Folder"

I want to remove all folders in a directory except specific ones. The problem is, it doesn't remove the folders with a space in their names.

So if I have:

Folder1
Folder2
Test Folder

And I want to keep Folder1, but delete the others.

ls | grep -v Folder1 | xargs rm -rf

That will delete Folder2, but not Test Folder because the command

rm -rf Test Folder

doesn't work.

Any help is appreciated and thanks for your time.

[vsemaska]

As you mentioned in your first example the name has to be enclosed in quotes in order to access file or folder names with spaces in them. So you have to use quotes in the xargs command. You do this using the -I option as follows:

ls | grep -v Folder1 | xargs -I xxx rm -rfv "xxx"

In this example the xxx will be replaced with the file/folder name. Since the name is now enclosed in quotes names with spaces in them will work.

[dennis89]

Thanks for the reply vsemaska,

I already found a solution though.

I decided to use sed to replace the space with a backslash space.

ls | grep -v Folder1 | sed 's/ /\\ /' | xargs rm -rf

This thread can be locked/closed now.

[secondmouse]

Using just the command find, better solution maybe?

find . -mindepth 1 -type d -path ./Folder1 -o -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf