How to remove old Docker containers

Since Docker 1.13.x you can use Docker container prune:

docker container prune

This will remove all stopped containers and should work on all platforms the same way.

There is also a Docker system prune:

docker system prune

which will clean up all unused containers, networks, images (both dangling and unreferenced), and optionally, volumes, in one command.

For older Docker versions, you can string Docker commands together with other Unix commands to get what you need. Here is an example on how to clean up old containers that are weeks old:

$ docker ps --filter "status=exited" | grep 'weeks ago' | awk '{print $1}' | xargs --no-run-if-empty docker rm

To give credit, where it is due, this example is from https://twitter.com/jpetazzo/status/347431091415703552.

Another method, which I got from Guillaume J. Charmes (credit where it is due):

docker rm `docker ps --no-trunc -aq`

will remove all containers in an elegant way.

And by Bartosz Bilicki, for Windows:

FOR /f "tokens=*" %i IN ('docker ps -a -q') DO docker rm %i

For PowerShell:

docker rm @(docker ps -aq)

An update with Docker 1.13 (Q4 2016), credit to VonC (later in this thread):

docker system prune will delete ALL unused data (i.e., in order: containers stopped, volumes without containers and images with no containers).

See PR 26108 and commit 86de7c0, which are introducing a few new commands to help facilitate visualizing how much space the Docker daemon data is taking on disk and allowing for easily cleaning up "unneeded" excess.

docker system pruneWARNING! This will remove:    - all stopped containers    - all volumes not used by at least one container    - all images without at least one container associated to themAre you sure you want to continue? [y/N] y

Updated AnswerUse docker system prune or docker container prune now. See VonC's updated answer.

Previous AnswerComposing several different hints above, the most elegant way to remove all non-running containers seems to be:

docker rm $(docker ps -q -f status=exited)

• -q prints just the container ids (without column headers)
• -f allows you to filter your list of printed containers (in this case we are filtering to only show exited containers)