rm - Remove objects

Synopsis

gsutil rm [-f] [-r] url...
gsutil rm [-f] [-r] -I

Description

The gsutil rm command removes objects and/or buckets. For example, the following command removes the object kitten.png:

gsutil rm gs://bucket/kitten.png

Use the -r option to specify recursive object deletion. For example, the following command removes gs://bucket/subdir and all objects and subdirectories under it:

gsutil rm -r gs://bucket/subdir

When working with versioning-enabled buckets, note that the -r option removes all object versions in the subdirectory. To remove only the live version of each object in the subdirectory, use the ** wildcard.

The following command removes all versions of all objects in a bucket, and then deletes the bucket:

gsutil rm -r gs://bucket

To remove all objects and their versions from a bucket without deleting the bucket, use the -a option:

gsutil rm -a gs://bucket/**

If you have a large number of objects to remove, use the gsutil -m option, which enables multi-threading/multi-processing:

gsutil -m rm -r gs://my_bucket/subdir

You can pass a list of URLs (one per line) to remove on stdin instead of as command line arguments by using the -I option. This allows you to use gsutil in a pipeline to remove objects identified by a program, such as:

some_program | gsutil -m rm -I

The contents of stdin can name cloud URLs and wildcards of cloud URLs.

Note that gsutil rm refuses to remove files from the local file system. For example, this fails:

gsutil rm *.txt

Options

-f

Continues silently (without printing error messages) despite errors when removing multiple objects. If some of the objects could not be removed, gsutil's exit status will be non-zero even if this flag is set. Execution will still halt if an inaccessible bucket is encountered. This option is implicitly set when running "gsutil -m rm ...".

-I

Causes gsutil to read the list of objects to remove from stdin. This allows you to run a program that generates the list of objects to remove.

-R, -r

The -R and -r options are synonymous. Causes bucket or bucket subdirectory contents (all objects and subdirectories that it contains) to be removed recursively. If used with a bucket-only URL (like gs://bucket), after deleting objects and subdirectories gsutil deletes the bucket. This option implies the -a option and deletes all object versions. If you only want to delete live object versions, use the ** wildcard instead of -r.

-a

Delete all versions of an object.