Deleting subdirectories and files in a given directory

Question

I want to delete all subdirectories and files from a directory, but not the directory itself. For examnple, if I pass "Sample" directory in a variable, and "Sample" directory contains three subdirectories and 3 files, I want to delete all that 3 directories and 3 files. In practice, the "Sample" directory can contain many subdirectories and files.

Answer 1

ETA: This is actually in perlfaq5: How do I delete a directory tree?

Use File::Path, core module.

perl -MFile::Path=remove_tree -we 
    'remove_tree("Sample",{keep_root=>1}) or die $!'

The keep_root option will cause remove_tree to keep the top directory:

keep_root => $bool

When set to a true value, will cause all files and subdirectories to be removed, except the initially specified directories. This comes in handy when cleaning out an application's scratch directory.