How to delete all files from Amazon S3 bucket

November 9, 2013 • 2 minutes read

Unfortunately there is no way to remove all files from bucket in Amazon AWS console. But how to remove all files from Amazon S3 bucket? I did that with an s3cmd tool and a small bash script.

First of all you need to install the s3cmd tool. In Ubuntu it is possible with the next command:

sudo apt-get install s3cmd
s3cmd –configure

After that you will be able to remove all files from your bucket with "one line" bash script:

FILES=(`s3cmd ls s3://mybucket | grep -v DIR | awk '{print $4}' | tr '\n' ' '`) && for FILENAME in ${FILES[*]}; do s3cmd del $FILENAME; done

but this will remove only files except directories. To remove directories you need to run another one "one line" script on bash:

DIRS=(`s3cmd ls s3://mybucket | grep DIR | awk '{print $2}' | tr '\n' ' '`) && for DIRNAME in ${DIRS[*]}; do s3cmd del --recursive $DIRNAME; done

That's all. After these commands your bucket should be empty and I hope these commands will help you to save some time

Translation of this article: Русский