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up vote 3 down vote favorite

I thought the flags I mentioned in the question are the same, but I get the following message with the former, but nothing with the latter:

$ find . -mindepth 1 -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;
find: `./practice4': No such file or directory
find: `./practice10': No such file or directory
find: `./practice7': No such file or directory
find: `./practice9': No such file or directory
find: `./practice1': No such file or directory
find: `./practice5': No such file or directory
find: `./practice3': No such file or directory
find: `./practice6': No such file or directory
find: `./practice2': No such file or directory
find: `./practice8': No such file or directory

Extra questions I have are:, is there an simpler code to delete all subdirectories? Is the order of deletion random? I created the directories using 

$ mkdir practice{1..10}
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You could use the BASH construct for iterating over files: for dir in practice{1..10}; do rm -rf $dir; done. – htor Feb 20 at 22:23
1  
Even simpler: rm -rf practice{1..10} – laebshade Feb 21 at 2:16

2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

From the GNU find manual:

If your find' command removes directories, you may find that you get a spurious error message whenfind' tries to recurse into a directory that has now been removed. Using the `-depth' option will normally resolve this problem.

Other questions:

  • The simplicity of the command depends on your situation, which in the listed case would be: rm -rf practice*.
  • IIRC, the processing order of the files depends on the file system.
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up vote 2 down vote

Thor has already explained why you're getting this error and how to fix it when using find.

Calling find with -mindepth 1 is pointless unless you have additional conditions that can't be expressed in a shell script. What you're trying to do can be written

rm -rf */

as long as the current directory doesn't contain any directory whose name begins with . (which wouldn't be matched by *) or symbolic links to directories (which your find command excludes but the shell snippet above includes).

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1  
In bash you can include .* (without . and ..) by setting GLOBIGNORE=. – Hauke Laging Feb 21 at 1:38

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