The rm command can be used to remove files and directories. Let's take an example where there is a file named file1 at /home/john.doe.

[john.doe@server1 ~]# ls -l
-rw-rw-r--.  1  john.doe  john.doe  183  May 23 18:53  file1

The rm command followed by the file name can be used to remove the file. In this example, file1 is removed, and file1 no longer resides in the /home/john.doe directory.

[john.doe@server1 ~]# rm file1
[john.doe@server1 ~]# ls -l

Remove another users file

By default, you can remove files you own, and you cannot remove files you do not own. For example, if jane.doe attempts to remove file1, which is owned by john.doe, an error will appear.

[jane.doe@server1 ~]# rm /home/john.doe/file1
rm: cannot remove '/home/john.doe/file1': Permission denied

If jane.doe is a member of the sudo group, jane.doe can remove file1 using the sudo command.

[jane.doe@server1 ~]# sudo rm /home/john.doe/file1

Root can remove any file without having to use sudo.

[root@server1 ~]# rm /home/john.doe/file1

Remove directories

Let's say there is a directory named bin in the /home/john.doe directory.

[john.doe@server1 ~]# ls -l
drwxrwxr-x.  2  john.doe  john.doe  6  May 23 19:06  bin

The rm command without any options will display an error when attempting to remove the bin directory.

[john.doe@server1 ~]# rm /home/john.doe/bin
rm: cannot remove '/home/john.doe/bin': Is a directory

The -r, -R, or --recursive option can be used to remove directories that are not empty. This will also remove all of the contents inside of the directory.

[john.doe@server1 ~]# rm -r /home/john.doe/bin

The -d or --dir option can be used to remove a directory that is empty.

[john.doe@server1 ~]# rm -d /home/john.doe/bin

Prompt before removal

To ebb on the side of caution, the -i or -I options can be used to display a prompt before removing a file.

[john.doe@server1 ~]# rm -i /home/john.doe/file1
rm: remove regular file 'file1'?

The -i option will prompt for every file being removed. For example, let's say the /home/john.doe directory contains 5 files.

[john.doe@server1 ~]# rm -i /home/john.doe/*
rm: remove regular file 'file1'?
rm: remove regular file 'file2'?
rm: remove regular file 'file3'?
rm: remove regular file 'file4'?
rm: remove regular file 'file5'?

The -I option will only prompt once for every file being removed.

[john.doe@server1 ~]# rm -I /home/john.doe/*
rm: remove 5 arguments?

Exclude files from being removed

This command will remove all of the files in the present working directory except for example.txt. However, this will not remove files that contain spaces in the file name.

ls | grep -v example.txt | xargs rm

This will remove files that contain spaces in the file name.

ls | grep -v example.txt | parallel rm