C system function causes error ‘sh: Syntax error: “(” unexpected ‘

I wrote a simple program in C on Linux to delete all the files in a directory except one called svn like this:

  1 #include <stdio.h>
  2 
  3 int main()
  4 {
  5     system("rm !(svn)");
  6     return 0;
  7 }

But when I compile and run it, the terminal says: sh: Syntax error: "(" unexpected

However, when I type and run the command in the terminal directly, all things are done correctly. Any ideas?

Answer

The answer is don’t use system. Use the Linux system calls to list the files in the directory and remove them using unlink(). Something like:

DIR* dirHandle = opendir(dirName);
struct dirent* dirEntry;
while ((dirEntry = readdir(dirHandle)) != NULL)
{
    if (strcmp(dirEntry->d_name, "svn") != 0)
    {
        unlink(dirEntry->d_name);
    }
}

Warning: all error handling omitted, not compiled and tested, readdir might return . and .. which also need to be not deleted.