How to delete files and folders via SSH

There may be times when you need to delete a file or folder from the system, and since I can never remember, here's a handy reminder.

To carry out these deletions using SSH, you need to run the appropriate -rm command.

In its simplest form, the command looks like this:

rm myFile.txt myFile1.txt myFile2.txt

However, listing all the files/folders that need to be deleted can be very time-consuming. Fortunately, rm accepts several arguments that can make the task easier. In the example above, you could type

rm myFile*.txt

This will match all files starting with "myFile" and ending with ".txt" and delete them.

To recursively delete an entire folder and its contents, you can use:

rm -rf foldername/

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

rm -rf *