remove-glob

A tiny cross-platform utility to remove items or directories recursively, it also accepts an optional glob pattern. There's also a CLI for easy, cross-platform usage. It uses 2 small dependencies tinyglobby for glob support and cli-nano for the CLI.

Inspired by rimraf and premove but also supports glob pattern to remove multiple files or directories.

Install

npm install remove-glob

Command Line

A remove binary is available, it takes an optional path argument (zero or multiple file/directory paths) to be removed or a --glob pattern instead of path(s).

[!NOTE] The paths and glob arguments are both optionals, but you must provide at least 1 of them. However, please note that providing both of them simultaneously is not supported and will throw an error (choose the option that is best suited to your use case).

Usage:
  remove [paths..] [options]  Remove all items recursively

Arguments:
  paths           directory or file paths to remove                                         [string..]

Options:
      --cwd       Directory to resolve from (default ".")                                   [string]
  -d, --dryRun    Show which files/dirs would be deleted but without actually removing them [boolean]
  -g, --glob      Glob pattern(s) to find which files/dirs to remove                        [array]
  -s, --stat      Show the stats of the items being removed                                 [boolean]
  -V, --verbose   If true, it will log each file or directory being removed                 [boolean]
  -h, --help      Show help                                                                 [boolean]
  -v, --version   Show version number                                                       [boolean]

Remove files or directories. Note: on Windows globs must be double quoted, everybody else can quote however they please.

# remove "foo" and "bar" via `npx`
$ npx remove foo bar

# or remove using glob pattern(s)
$ npx remove --glob \"dist/**/*.js\"
$ npx remove --glob=\"dist/**/*.js\" --glob=\"packages/*/tsconfig.tsbuildinfo\"

# install globally, use whenever
$ npm install remove-glob -g
$ remove foo bar
$ remove --glob \"dist/**/*.{js,map}\"

[!NOTE] When using the --glob option, it will skip .git/ and node_modules/ directories by default.

Usage

import { resolve } from 'node:path';
import { removeSync } from 'remove-glob';

// remove via paths
removeSync({ paths: './foobar' });
removeSync({ paths: ['./foo/file1.txt', './foo/file2.txt'] });

// or remove via glob pattern
removeSync({ glob: 'foo/**/*.txt' });

// Using `cwd` option
const dir = resolve('./foo/bar');
await removeSync({ paths: ['hello.txt'], cwd: dir });

JavaScript API

import { removeSync } from 'remove-glob';

removeSync(opt, callback);

The first argument is an object holding any of the options shown below. The last argument is an optional callback function that will be executed after all files were removed.

{
  cwd: string;              // directory to resolve your `filepath` from, defaults to `process.cwd()`
  dryRun: boolean;          // show what would be copied, without actually copying anything
  paths: string | string[]; // filepath(s) to remove – may be a file or a directory.
  glob: string;             // glob pattern to find which files/directories to remove
  stats: boolean;           // show some statistics after execution (time + file count)
  verbose: boolean;         // print more information to console when executing the removal
}

[!NOTE] The first argument is required and it must include either a paths or a glob, but it cannot include both options simultaneously.

Used by

I use it in most of my own open source projects as a Dev Dependency (feel free to modify this list and add your project(s) as well)

• Lerna-Lite
• SlickGrid
• Slickgrid-Universal