Deleting multiple directories dives errors.

[Gulam Mohiuddin]

I am running following commands to remove more than 500+ directories:

#ll |grep dr |xargs rm -r

Gives lots of errors:
rm: drwxr-x--- non-existent
rm: 3 non-existent
rm: root non-existent
rm: sys non-existent
rm: 96 non-existent
rm: Jan non-existent
rm: 16 non-existent
rm: 10:44 non-existent
rm: drwxr-x--- non-existent
rm: 3 non-existent
rm: root non-existent
rm: sys non-existent
.
.
.

Thanks.

Gulam

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Gulam:

You have passed to 'rm' every space-delimited token reported by 'll'. To see the result of what you asked, do:

# ll | grep dr | xargs

At the very least, you probably want to simply use 'ls' without any options.

# ls |grep dr | ...

Regards!

...JRF...

[Gulam Mohiuddin]

Thanks for your response.

But using ls doesn't returns anything
#ls |grep dr
#

Where "grep dr" I was using to filter only directory names.

Gulam.

[Bill Hassell]

ll produces a long line of text items, not just the list of names in the current directory. So the non-existant filenames are actually portions of the ll listing such as permissions, owner/group, date, size, etc.

When you need to remove a lot of files, *ALWAYS* preview the task. Using your example, it is assumed that you are in the correct directory. Rather than use ll, just use which matches all the filenames in the current directory and grep for dr. To preview this, type:

ls | grep dr

*IF* the result is a list of the files you want to delete, you can then pipe the result to your xargs command:

ls | grep dr | xargs rm -f

[Patrick Wallek]

If, by using the 'grep dr' you are looking for the first 2 characters in the permissions list 'drwx------' or whatever, to find a directory, then you may want to rethink your command. By doing this you will also pass the '.' and '..' directories to your 'rm -r' command.

I would try something like this:

# ll | grep ^dr | awk '{print $9}' > dir_fie

Now I would edit the dir_file with vi and remove the '.' and '..' entries and also verify that the other dirs are what you want.

Then you could do something like:

for DIR in $(cat dir_file)
do
echo "Removing ${DIR}"
rm -r ${DIR}
done

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Gulam:

Instead of 'ls' you could use 'find' :

# find /your_path -type d | xargs ...

Regards!

...JRF...

[Gulam Mohiuddin]

Yes, I want to only remove all dir:

But running following still gives errors:

#find . -type d | xargs rm -r

rm: cannot remove .. or .
rm: ./PSAPPSRV.21455/cache non-existent
rm: ./PSAPPSRV.21518/cache non-existent
rm: ./PSAPPSRV.21979/cache non-existent
rm: ./PSAPPSRV.22244/cache non-existent
rm: ./PSAPPSRV.22935/cache non-existent
.
.
.

Gulam.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again) Gulam:

Please be specific and be careful. What you probably did is what you wanted to do, except that the recursive remove removed upper-level directories before subordinate ones were handled. You could have done:

# find /my_path -xdev -type d -depth xargs rm -r

As already noted, too, things like this should be tested beforehand!

See the manpages for more information.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Gulam Mohiuddin]

Thanks everyone it worked now.

Gulam.