Re: rmdir when directory is not empty

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Chasecreek Systemhouse wrote:
On 12/20/05, Mogens Kjaer <mk@xxxxxx> wrote:


That won't work on directories that have tens of thousands of files.

Why not?

As long as you don't do a:

rm -f /dir/folder-with-many-files/*

that, of course won't work, but

rm -rf /dir/folder-with-many-files

should work.



Have you tried it?  rm will fail because the shell cannot keep track
of that many; the find cmd works because it deals with one file at a time.

The shell never sees the big list, only rm does. That was the point the previous poster was making.

One thing that "rm -rf" won't handle though, is directories that you don't have write permission on. Try this:

$ mkdir -p fred/jim/sheila
$ chmod 555 fred/jim
$ rm -rf fred
rm: cannot remove directory `fred/jim/sheila': Permission denied

This can be fixed using chmod:

$ chmod -R a+rwx fred
$ rm -rf fred
(success!)

Paul.


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