Shell Programming and Scripting

The -depth parameter to "find" should start from the deepest level and work up.
I can see potential issues with "rm -rf" on a directory name because it deletes that directory too.
Personally I have not issued "rm -rf" in years. There is always a safer and more predictable method where you first produce a list to review.


alister's explanation and solution is very good.

Just curious: does the suggested -exec '{}' for work when you run it directly? ie, not from a crontab entry?

Me too. The issue with "find" and {} or '{}' regarding arguments containing space characters has been evident for many years. Having examined the source code of a current unix "find" there is no reason to quote {}. However in my experence it is sometimes necessary to quote '{}'. This board has experienced posters who could resolve this issue. With current shells it has to be something to do with context.

Definitely.
As far as efficiency is concerned,
one could reduce further the fork/exec storm:

- use + instead of \; to make it work like xargs (n at a time):

Code:

... -exec rm -r {} +

(I believe that -f is not needed in a non interactive sessions, i.e. cron)

or, if the + syntax is not supported:

- pipe the output to xargs, like already suggested

---------- Post updated at 09:03 AM ---------- Previous update was at 08:56 AM ----------

Yep,
I remember that discussion very well,
that's why I asked for details

And that's why I suggested the depth option, to see if the filename really matters.

Nope, none of the '{}' options or using the -depth worked, but the xargs did work.

or has been a urban legend for many years, depending on who you ask ... You are still missing these quotes are stripped off by the shell before the braces are passed to the find command and so there is no much point in expecting them to have an effect on the find command itself. The only reason to quote them would be to use a shell that has a special interpretation of these curly braces, but there is no such beast around. There is no such evidence I'm aware of.

Anyway, back to the open poster issue, it would be interesting to get a reproducible use case to figure out why xargs work where find alone doesn't.

I'm especially interested seeing what display these three commands:

Code:

 find /path -mindepth 3 -type d -exec /bin/rm -rf {} \;

Code:

 find /path -mindepth 3 -type d -exec rm -rf {} +

and

Code:

 find /path -mindepth 3 -type d -exec echo "[" {} "}" \;

This is not true:

Code:

; find /tmp -type d -exec ls -ld {} +
syntax error
; find /tmp -type d -exec ls -ld '{}' +
drwxrwxrwt+ 1 sysadmin root 0 2010-03-16 17:01 /tmp
; echo $version
1.7.1 $Release: @(#)rc 1.7.1 2003-07-17 $

I think you'll get the same or similar error with es.

As already demonstrated in the older thread:

Code:

% touch a\ b
% find . -type f -ls
4222124650680077    0 -rw-r--r--   1 sysadmin None            0 Mar 16 21:16 ./a\ b
% find . -type f -exec sh -c 'f={}' - \;
-: b: command not found
% find . -type f -exec sh -c 'f="{}"' - \;
%