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URL: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-remove-docker-images-containers-and-volumes?comment=77467

⇱ How To Remove Docker Images, Containers, and Volumes | DigitalOcean


👁 How To Remove Docker Images, Containers, and Volumes

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👁 Anish Singh Walia
Anish Singh Walia
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Sr Technical Content Strategist and Team Lead
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I help Businesses scale with AI x SEO x (authentic) Content that revives traffic and keeps leads flowing | 3,000,000+ Average monthly readers on Medium | Sr Technical Writer(Team Lead) @ DigitalOcean | Ex-Cloud Consultant @ AMEX | Ex-Site Reliability Engineer(DevOps)@Nutanix

👁 Manikandan Kurup
Manikandan Kurup
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Senior Technical Content Engineer I
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With over 6 years of experience in tech publishing, Mani has edited and published more than 75 books covering a wide range of data science topics. Known for his strong attention to detail and technical knowledge, Mani specializes in creating clear, concise, and easy-to-understand content tailored for developers.

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There is -q missing in Remove containers using more than one filter

should be docker rm $(docker ps -a -f status=exited -f status=created -q)

Super handy article!

I think the “Removing images according to a pattern” and “Remove containers according to a pattern” are mixed up.

For images:

docker images | grep "pattern" | awk '{print $3}' | xargs docker rmi

and alternatively, I found this one to work better (as multiple tags can link to a same image):

docker images | grep "pattern" | awk '{print $1":"$2}' | xargs docker rmi

For containers:

docker ps -a | grep "pattern" | awk '{print $1}' | xargs docker rm

Thanks for this detailed useful article! For now as a punch line you can add the new alternate way : docker system prune See https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/system_prune/ Can’t figure out since this new command released.

This was a life saver. I am a rookie at this and it helped greatly. Thanks!

What about the build in CLI tools

docker system prune

docker volume prune

docker network prune

And you are done!

Thanks for the document. To remove dangling images the command seems to be docker image prune, not docker images purge

λ docker image prune
WARNING! This will remove all dangling images.
Are you sure you want to continue? [y/N] y
Deleted Images:
[...]

Nice… A quick read for the essential cmds…

An add up, use xargs with *-r * flag. Otherwise if left hand side doesn’t give any data which will trigger error

-r, --no-run-if-empty if there are no arguments, then do not run COMMAND; if this option is not given, COMMAND will be run at least once

docker images -a | grep “pattern” | awk ‘{print $3}’ | xargs -r docker rmi

That’s good, thanks for this complete post, it’s appreciated!

Thanks! It resolved my issue!

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