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Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users Delete empty directories recursively - HP-UX Post 302529226 by alister on Wednesday 8th of June 2011 08:28:12 PM
Old 06-08-2011
Hi, methyl:

Quote:
Originally Posted by methyl
Scary piece of code. Tries to remove every directory in the tree one-by-one and ignores all errors.
I disagree. It seems quite safe to me. rmdir will not remove a directory that is not empty. It's also efficient since rmdir is called with as many arguments at a time as the system allows. Even if most of the directories are not empty and rmdir cannot remove them, any approach would have to either attempt the removal or test the directory's emptiness.


Quote:
Originally Posted by methyl
Hmm. Removes all empty directories on the first pass. Needs multiple passes to remove directories which have become empty.
Incorrect. Note that this is a depth-first traversal. If the removal of a directory creates an empty parent, this is not a problem since the parent is visited subsequently. It is a single-pass operation.

Regards,
Alister
 

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rmdir(1)						      General Commands Manual							  rmdir(1)

NAME
rmdir - remove directories SYNOPSIS
dir ... DESCRIPTION
removes the directory entry for each dir operand that refers to an empty directory. Directories are removed in the order specified. Consequently, if a directory and a subdirectory of that directory are both specified as arguments, the subdirectory must be specified before the parent directory so that the parent directory will be empty when tries to remove it. Removal of a directory requires write and search (execute) permission in its parent directory, but no permissions on the directory itself; but if the sticky bit is set on the parent directory, only the owner of the directory, the owner of the parent directory, or a user having appropriate privileges can remove the directory. Options recognizes the following options: Force each directory to be removed without prompting for confirmation, regardless of the presence of the option. This option also suppresses diagnostic messages regarding non-exis- tent operands. This option does not suppress any diagnostic messages other than those regarding non-existent operands. To suppress all error message and interactive prompts, the option should be used while redirecting the standard error output to This option ignores any previous occurrence of the option. Write a prompt to the standard error output requesting confirmation before removing each directory. This option ignores any previous occurrence of the option. Path removal. If, after removing a directory with more than one pathname component, the parent directory of that directory is now empty, removes the empty parent directory. This continues until encounters a non-empty parent directory, or until all components of the original pathname have been removed. When used in conjunction with the option, asks whether to remove each directory component of a path. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES
Environment Variables provides a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. If is unset or null, the default value of "C" (see lang(5)) is used. If any of the internationalization variables contains an invalid setting, will behave as if all internationalization variables are set to "C". See environ(5). If set to a non-empty string value, overrides the values of all the other internationalization variables. determines the interpretation of dir names as single and/or multi-byte characters, the classification of characters as printable, and the characters matched by character class expressions in regular expressions. determines the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error and informa- tive messages written to standard output. determines the location of message catalogues for the processing of International Code Set Support Single- and multi-byte character code sets are supported. DIAGNOSTICS
Generally self-explanatory. Note that the option does not suppress all diagnostic messages. EXAMPLES
To remove directories with a prompt for verification: directories To remove as much as possible of a path, type: SEE ALSO
rm(1), rmdir(2), stat(2). STANDARDS CONFORMANCE
rmdir: SVID2, XPG2, XPG3, XPG4 rmdir(1)
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