Shell Programming and Scripting

Below script complains about remove, because the find that pipes into it has no results. It's okay operationally, but a bad error message.

I would like to first check whether find had any output, and only if it had output do the rm with xargs.

How can I check whether find had output?

Thanks!

**********
$ ./clean-createTopTen-output-dir ~/output-testdir/
rm
rm: missing operand
Try `rm --help' for more information.

$ cat clean-createTopTen-output-dir
#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
echo "usage: clean-createTopTen-output-dir ~/outputdir"
echo "removes CreateTopTen-outputted files from ~/outputdir"
exit
fi

cleandir=$1

# for now, just delete every file that is not a gif
# but leave dir structure intact
find $cleandir -type f ! -name *gif | xargs -t rm

$ find ~/output-testdir -type f ! -name *gif

(no files found)

Please put code in code tags.

Code:

#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -ne 1  ]; then
  echo "usage: clean-createTopTen-output-dir ~/outputdir"
  echo "removes CreateTopTen-outputted files from ~/outputdir"
  exit
fi

cleandir=$1

# for now, just delete every file that is not a gif
# but leave dir structure intact
find $cleandir -type f ! -name *gif | xargs -t rm

Change rm to rm -f and that error message will disappear.

Code:

$ rm
rm: too few arguments
Try `rm --help' for more information.

$ rm -f
$

Alternatively, you could do it in xargs.

Code:

$ xargs ls < /dev/null
( current directory contents)

$ xargs --no-run-if-empty ls < /dev/null
$