This is a text-only version of the following page on https://raymii.org:

This is a text-only version of the following page on https://raymii.org:
---
Title : Bash bits: find has a -delete flag
Author : Remy van Elst
Date : 14-07-2019
URL : https://raymii.org/s/snippets/Bash_bits_find_has_a_delete_option.html
Format : Markdown/HTML
---

Bash Bits are small examples, tips and tutorials for the bash shell.
This bash bit shows you that find has a `-delete` option. I recently found this
out, before I would always use `-exec rm {} \;`. This is shorter and easier to
remember.

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[All Bash Bits can be found using this link][98]
[98]: https://raymii.org/s/tags/bash-bits.html

### find -delete flag

A long long time ago one of my co-workers showed me an option to `find` which
removes all the files the find command found. Let's say I would want to remove
all `.txt` files in a folder, I first would build the `find` command:

find . -type f -iname "*.txt"

If it found files, a list of them will be printed to the console. After checking
the list, I would append the command to remove all found results:

find . -type f -iname "*.txt" -exec rm {} \;

That would, for every file, run the command `rm filename;`. This is a lot of typing
and depending on the shell you might need to escape characters (like here).

Just now I was looking to remove all empty directories and found on the find
[manpage][1] that it nowdays has a `-delete` flag. Which makes the above command
easier:

find . -type f -iname "*.txt" -delete

Or in my case, to remove empty directories:

find . -type d -empty -delete

(if you omit the `-type d` find will also remove empty files).

The `-delete` flag will perform better since it doesn't have to spawn an external
`rm` process for every file. However, the [POSIX 1003.1 man page][2] for find
specifies `-exec` but not `-delete`, thus the former being a requirement for POSIX
compatibility. Some embedded linux systems or UNIX systems therefore might also not
have the `delete` flag.

The [manpage][1] has more information including a warning:

> Delete files; true if removal succeeded. If the removal failed, an error message
is issued. If -delete fails, find's exit status will be nonzero (when it
eventually exits). Use of -delete automatically turns on the '-depth' option.
Warnings: Don't forget that the find command line is evaluated as an expression, so
putting -delete first will make find try to delete everything below the starting
points you specified. When testing a find command line that you later intend to
use with -delete, you should explicitly specify -depth in order to avoid later
surprises.

[1]: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/en/man1/find.1.html
[2]: https://www.unix.com/man-page/posix/1p/find/

---

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