Databases, Systems & Networks

I type ‘find . -type d -iname foo -delete‘ command to find the foo directories and delete them. However, I am getting an error message that read as find: cannot delete './hourly.4/data/foo': Directory not empty on Linux server. How do delete directories based on find command output on Linux or Unix-like system?

The -delete option remove the DIRECTORY(ies), if they are empty. You need to use the -execoption to delete all directories and its contents. The syntax is as follows.

Find command syntax to delete dirs

Try:
find /dir/to/search/ -type d -name "dirName" -exec rm -rf {} +
OR
find /dir/to/search/ -type d -name "dirName" -exec rm -rf \;

Warning: Be careful with the rm command when using with find. You may end up deleting unwanted data.

Find will execute given command when it finds files or dirs. For example:
find . -type d -name "foo" -exec rm -rf {} +
OR
find . -type d -name "bar" -exec rm -rf "{}" \;
Sample outputs:

removed './daily.0/bar/.cache/motd.legal-displayed'
removed directory './daily.0/bar/root/.cache'
removed './daily.0/bar/.lesshst'
removed './daily.0/bar/.viminfo'
removed './daily.0/bar/.vim/.netrwhist'
removed directory './daily.0/bar/root/.vim'
removed './daily.0/bar/root/.bashrc'
removed './daily.0/bar/.ssh/authorized_keys'
removed directory './daily.0/bar/root'
removed directory './daily.0/bar/var/spool/cron/crontabs'

You can find directories that are at least four levels deep in the working directory /backups/:
find /backups/ -type d -name "bar" -depth +4 -print0 -exec rm -rf {} +

Find and xargs

The syntax is as follows to find and delete directories on Linux/Unix system:
## delete all empty dirs ##
find /path/to/dir/ -type d -empty -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} /bin/rm -rf "{}"
## delete all foo dirs including subdirs in /backups/
find /backups/ -type d -name "foo*" -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} /bin/rm -rf "{}"
The second command is secure and fast version as it deals with weird dir names such as:

• “foo bar”
• “Foo _ *bar”