How to remove all files from directory without removing directory in Node.js

How to remove all files from a directory without removing a directory itself using Node.js?
I want to remove temporary files. I am not any good with filesystems yet.

I have found this method, which will remove files and the directory. In that, something like /path/to/directory/* won't work.

I don't really know what commands should use. Thanks for the help.

Solution 1:

To remove all files from a directory, first you need to list all files in the directory using fs.readdir, then you can use fs.unlink to remove each file. Also fs.readdir will give just the file names, you need to concat with the directory name to get the full path.

Here is an example

const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');

const directory = 'test';

fs.readdir(directory, (err, files) => {
  if (err) throw err;

  for (const file of files) {
    fs.unlink(path.join(directory, file), err => {
      if (err) throw err;
    });
  }
});

Solution 2:

Yes, there is a module fs-extra. There is a method .emptyDir() inside this module which does the job. Here is an example:

const fsExtra = require('fs-extra')

fsExtra.emptyDirSync(fileDir)

There is also an asynchronous version of this module too. Anyone can check out the link.

Solution 3:

There is package called rimraf that is very handy. It is the UNIX command rm -rf for node.

Nevertheless, it can be too powerful too because you can delete folders very easily using it. The following commands will delete the files inside the folder. If you remove the *, you will remove the log folder.

const rimraf = require('rimraf');
rimraf('./log/*', function () { console.log('done'); });

https://www.npmjs.com/package/rimraf

Solution 4:

Building on @Waterscroll's response, if you want to use async and await in node 8+:

const fs = require('fs');
const util = require('util');
const readdir = util.promisify(fs.readdir);
const unlink = util.promisify(fs.unlink);
const directory = 'test';

async function toRun() {
  try {
    const files = await readdir(directory);
    const unlinkPromises = files.map(filename => unlink(`${directory}/${filename}`));
    return Promise.all(unlinkPromises);
  } catch(err) {
    console.log(err);
  }
}

toRun();