rm option: excluding files

[buschi]

Hi!

Is there a special reason (or am I simply too dumb to discover it) for rm not having an option to exclude some files? It is easy to erase all tex-files in a folder with

rm *.tex

However, if I want to erase all files except the tex-files, I have to use something like

rm `ls * | grep -v ".tex"`


If someone knowing C who wants to save me from replacing /bin/rm with an evil bash-script introducing a -x option feels like this was a good starting point to revolutionize coreutils, I am happy about any snippets... (already took a look at rm.c but can't even figure out where the actual "remove it" steps takes place :/)

Any advice why this is a really bad idea is also appreciated,
Sebastian.

[tomcheng76]

find ! -regex '.*\.\(tex\)' -exec echo {} \;

if what echo out is correct, change echo to rm

[tomcheng76]

i think the reason why rm dont include excluding file option
is dangerous, delete except .tex may accidently cause deleting file u dont want
also shell script is acturally program of many programs
as in the above example of yours and mine, we can already do the recursive delete except tex

[cwaldbieser]

Hi!

Is there a special reason (or am I simply too dumb to discover it) for rm not having an option to exclude some files? It is easy to erase all tex-files in a folder with

rm *.tex

However, if I want to erase all files except the tex-files, I have to use something like

rm `ls * | grep -v ".tex"`


If someone knowing C who wants to save me from replacing /bin/rm with an evil bash-script introducing a -x option feels like this was a good starting point to revolutionize coreutils, I am happy about any snippets... (already took a look at rm.c but can't even figure out where the actual "remove it" steps takes place :/)

Any advice why this is a really bad idea is also appreciated,
Sebastian.


The "rm" command really just takes a list of file names as its input. The '*.tex' pattern you give it is expanded by the shell, so rm really sees something like 'rm a.tex b.tex c.tex x.tex y.tex'.
There is a bash variable called GLOBIGNORE that will stor the shell from expanding certain patterns.

$ GLOBIGNORE='*.tex'
$ echo *

This should list all the files in the directory except those that match the *.tex pattern.