UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am using find to get all the instances of a given directory name, then remove those directories with a -exec rm command.
here is an example:

mkdir -p foo/bar
find foo -name bar -exec rm -rf {} \;

foo will get deleted as I desired, however this pops out on standard error:
find: foo/bar: No such file or directory

why does this error occur/how can i change the command to avoid the error? Thanks for the help =)

I guess what's happening is that find is storing all the subdirectories it finds in order to do a recursive search. So, it finds foo/bar and then wants to search it, but first it does your -exec, and then when it goes to search under foo/bar, it's not there.
One way to avoid this is to tell find not to bother searching in foo/bar

Code:

find foo -name bar -maxdepth 1 -exec rm -r {} \;

Another command that does this job:

Code:

find . -name /foo/bar | xargs rm

Nua7's solution is better, because then bar can be at any depth, e.g

Code:

mkdir -p foo/banana/bar
find foo -name bar | xargs rm -r

should work