A Quick Introduction to Unix/Deleting Files

Deleting files and directories

rm (remove)

To delete (remove) a file you use the command rm. So you might create a copy of a science.txt file and then delete it. You would type

% cp science.txt tempfile.txt
% ls
% rm tempfile.txt 
% ls

To delete several files you may be able to use a wildcard. Consider the following command

% rm *.txt

This will delete all files in the current directory with names ending .txt. If you use extensions (the bit of the filename after the dot) systematically this can be useful.

rmdir (remove directory)

You can use the rmdir command to remove a directory. If you have an empty directory that you no long require for example, you can type

%rmdir someoldolddirectory

(Of course, your directory probably isn't called someoldolddirectory but I think you get the idea.)

If however, you try to remove a directory that has files in it, you will not be able to since Unix will not let you remove a non-empty directory. The solution is to use the option –r on the rm command like this

% rm -r directory

and this will remove a directory and all its subdirectories even if they contain files. The -r stands for recursive.