Fish Shell: Delete All Except

Question

Using Fish, how can I delete the contents of a directory except for certain files (or directories). Something like rm !(file1|file2) from bash, but fishier.

Answer 1

There is no such feature in fish - that's issue #1444.

You can do something like

rm (string match -rv '^file1$|^file2$' -- *)

Note that this will fail on filenames with newlines in them.

Or you can do the uglier:

set -l files *
for file in file1 file2
    if set -l index (contains -i -- $file $files)
        set -e files[$index]
    end
end
rm $files

which should work no matter what the filenames contain.

Or, as mentioned in that issue, you can use find, e.g.

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -a ! \( -name 'file1' -o -name 'file2' \)