This may come in handy if your hosting account files are taking up too much space.
We are assuming that you have successfully created a new web hosting account.
We also assume that you have logged in to your brand-new cPanel hosting panel interface.
With these done, scroll to the Files section and click on the File Manager icon.
Ensure that you are in the right folder or directory.
Click to select the file or folder you want to delete.
Select Delete from the toolbar.
To confirm that you really want to delete the file or folder, click the Confirm button.
To delete a file using the command-line utility, use the "rm" command.
A word of caution though.
Deleting a file in Linux is an irrevocable act.
Let's change directory and visually list to confirm files/folders in this location:
cd public_html/testing && ls -al
total 12 drwxr-xr-x 2 username username 24 Nov 2 04:29 . drwxr-x--- 12 username nobody 4096 Nov 1 02:50 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 username username 6984 Oct 27 21:26 index.html
We can also just list from wherever we are:
ll public_html/testing
-rw-r--r-- 1 username username 6984 Oct 27 21:26 index.html -rw-rw-r-- 1 username username 0 Nov 1 02:20 index.txt
Let's now remove the "index.txt" file:
rm public_html/testing/index.txt
As you can see, if we list the content of that directory, you will see that the file is gone and cannot be recovered.:
ls -al .trash
total 4 drwx------ 2 username username 28 Nov 1 22:11 . drwx--x--x 27 username username 4096 Aug 26 06:13 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 username username 0 Nov 1 22:11 .trash_restore
That confirms that unlike removing a file or folder via cPanel File Manager, it is extremely difficult or (if not) impossible to recover deleted data on Unix-like operating systems.
When managing your files via cPanel's File Manager, you can delete a file and send it to the "Trash".
You also have the option to restore the file in case this was performed accidentally.
When running the "rm" command in a Linux system, you should be super careful, especially with regular expressions.
If you are not careful enough, the action will result in the deletion of important data/system files and non-intended files.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup before deleting a file in Linux via the command line.
To delete a single file:
rm $filename
If you want to interactively delete multiple files at once, simply list all of the file names after the “rm” command:
rm -i $filename1 $filename2 $filename3 $filename4 $filename5 etc
To remove a certain type of file:
rm *.php
To delete all hidden files (.htaccess, etc) in public_html:
find public_html/ -type f -name ".*" -delete
But what if you don't really want to delete these files?
Simply archive and compress them, download the archived file and then remove these from your system.
What if the system is unable to write to your error.log because it is full?
cat /dev/null > public_html/error_log
or
echo > public_html/error_log
You can also rotate or clear error_log files that grow to a certain size by creating a cron job:
find /home -path /home/$username-prune -false -o -type f -size 2M -name error_log -exec rm -f '{}' \;
If it is a WordPress website, you can elect to disable error logging by adding to "wp-config.php":
ini_set('display_errors', 'Off');
ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL );
define('WP_DEBUG', false);
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);
Deleting all files and subfolders in a folder is kinda different.
To remove a folder:
rm -d public_html/testing
or:
rmdir public_html/testing
If the folder or directory is not empty, you will likely meet with an error.
This is a built-in safeguard that helps prevent the accidental loss of data.
Since there is no -r option for "rmdir", you can recursively delete a directory by first deleting all of its contents, beginning with those in the lowest levels of sub-directories.
So to remove a directory with its contents, the most efficient method is to use the recursive option with the "rm" command:
rm -r public_html/testing
This of course will prompt you for confirmation.
To forcibly do this without prompting for confirmation or showing error messages:
cd public_html && rm -rf testing
