Bash Delete Everything But - Handy Function for your bashrc File

For me the use case was a cache directory that I wanted to clear out everything apart from one particular file that was expensive to create and didn’t need to be cleared for my purposes

I decided to add this to my ~/.bashrc file for ease of use in future.

Here is the function

# Remove Everything But
function rmbut(){
    local BUT="$@"
    ls | grep -v *$BUT* | while read f; do rm -rf $f; done
}

To use the function, simply cd to the directory you want to clear out and then call rmbut MyFileIWantToKeep