非零返回代码虽然找到-exec rm工作

Question

I'm on a linux system I wonder what is wrong with the following execution of find:

mkdir a && touch a/b                      
find . -name a -type d -exec echo '{}' \; 
./a
find . -name a -type d -exec rm -r '{}' \;
find: `./a': No such file or directory

The invocation of echo is just for testing purposes. I would expect the last command to remove the directory './a' entirely and return 0. Instead it removes the directory and generates the error message. To repeat, it does remove the directory! What is going on?

Answer 1

rm executes without a problem. The issue is that find is confused, since it knew the directory ./a was there, it tries to visit that directory to look for directories named a . However, find cannot enter the directory, since it was already removed.

One way to avoid this is to do

find -name a -type d | xargs rm -r

This will let the find move along before the rm command is executed. Or, you can simply ignore the error in your original command.

Answer 2

Based on epsalon's comment the solution is to use the -depth option which causes the deeper files to be visited first.

find . -depth -name a -type d -exec rm -r '{}' \;

does the trick. Thanks a bunch!

Answer 3

如果性能是个问题，请使用-prune以防止find降级到名为“a”的目录：

find . -name a -type d -prune -exec rm -r '{}' \;