Deleting S3 files with a given prefix only
You can use aws s3 rm command using the --include and --exclude parameters to specify a pattern for the files you'd like to delete.
So in your case, the command would be:
aws s3 rm s3://bucket/ --recursive --exclude "*" --include "abc_1*"
which will delete all files that match the "abc_1*" pattern in the bucket.
The behavior of these parameters is documented here
These instructions assume you have downloaded, installed and configured the AWS CLI tools
As a complement to @sippybear's excellent answer, I would recommend the following, if somebody has a bucket with a trillion objects and the pattern of the files one wants to delete includes "parent directories", e.g. 'my/path/to/topdir/abc_1*':
aws s3 rm --dryrun --recursive --exclude '*' --include 'abc_1*' s3://mybucket/my/path/to/topdir/
Why?
- this will restrict the search of objects to delete to the parent directory, thus considerably speeding up the operation;
- really, do yourself a favor and start with
--dryrun, even if you promptly interrupt it (ctrl-C); typos and other accidents happen and errors when deleting large number of files in a bucket can be very regrettable (even if you have proper backups)...
Once you're happy with what you see is about to be deleted, then remove the --dryrun.