Last year I had sunset a project that was using both AWS’ S3 and Linode’s
S3-compatible object storage offering. After pulling down some final snapshots,
I wanted to delete the buckets on both services.
Similar to the error you receive when you attempt to rmdir a directory with
files in it, you can’t delete an S3 bucket until it is empty. Unfortunately,
especially with S3-compatible implementations, the ability to trash all of the
files may not be readily available from a web UI.
That’s where s3cmd comes in extremely handy. For those not familiar,
s3cmd is a free command-line utility for working with S3 and
S3-compatible services. It also has a handy way to delete all files in a bucket
with ease!
Quite a few companies are offering S3-compatible object storage these days so if
you’re on AWS and looking for an alternative, you may want to check out my VPS
Showdown series (updated monthly!).
One more thing, I omitted the --force argument on the commands below to make
things a bit safer for folks that are opting to not read the post and just copy
and paste commands. To be able to remove a bucket and all files, you will
definitely need to include the --force argument.
Delete all files in a bucket
# Just the files
s3cmd del s3://YOURBUCKET
# Files and directories
s3cmd del s3://YOURBUCKET --recursive
Delete all files with a certain prefix in a bucket
# Just the files
s3cmd del s3://YOURBUCKET/YOURPREFIX
# Files and directories
s3cmd del s3://YOURBUCKET/YOURPREFIX --recursive
Delete all files AND the bucket itself
# Just the files
s3cmd rb s3://YOURBUCKET/YOURPREFIX
# Files and directories
s3cmd rb s3://YOURBUCKET/YOURPREFIX --recursive
