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Re: Reliable/safe way of removing empty maildirs?



I needed to empty some subdirectories and this is what I did:

du test
4       test/cur
4       test/tmp
4       test/new
16      test

Nothing in the test directory, so I deleted it.


On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 10:28:26PM +0000, Chris G wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 09:15:10PM +0000, A Darren Dunham wrote:
> > > >> chmod a-w dir/new
> > > >> if [ `find dir -type f` ] ; then
> > > >
> > > > You have to do something like this instead:
> > [snip other responses]
> > 
> > Perhaps I've misunderstood the reason for doing this, but I would just
> > ask find to do a rmdir, and let it fail if the directory isn't empty.
> > 
> > find dir -depth -type d -exec rmdir {} \;
> > 
> > If 'dir' is still around when that finishes, it's probably because
> > there's a file in there now.  In the meantime, it's removed all empty
> > subtrees.
> > 
> ... and left an *awful* mess, a maildir mailbox is a directory with
> *three* sub-directories in it, you need to check that all three are
> empty before removing them.
> 
> -- 
> Chris Green