Imagine you have a folder that has about 20 files that you need and like 100 files that you don’t. In this case, there is a very simple bash script that allows you to do that in a jiffy!

Here it is:

ls | grep -v "hobba.txt\|tito.sh\|mambo.sh\|.xlsx" | xargs rm

This command does the following (in order):

1. lists all files in the folder with “ls”
2. grep -v means grep everything except the following
3. The list of files – or globs – that it’s going to ignore, you have to separate each by pipe preceded with a backslash. It ignores 3 files and 1 glob:
   1. hobba.txt
   2. tito.sh
   3. mambo.sh
   4. .xlsx (means anything with extension .xlsx)
4. Finally it deletes them one by one through the xargs rm

Enjoy!

Sources: Many which I unfortunately forgot to take note of, but they are mostly from Stackoverflow