3.4 Delete Files

Action: -delete

Delete files or directories; true if removal succeeded. If the removal failed, an error message is issued and find’s exit status will be nonzero (when it eventually exits).

Warning: Don’t forget that find evaluates the command line as an expression, so putting ‘-delete’ first will make find try to delete everything below the starting points you specified.

The use of the ‘-delete’ action on the command line automatically turns on the ‘-depth’ option. As in turn ‘-depth’ makes ‘-prune’ ineffective, the ‘-delete’ action cannot usefully be combined with ‘-prune’.

Often, the user might want to test a find command line with ‘-print’ prior to adding ‘-delete’ for the actual removal run. To avoid surprising results, it is usually best to remember to use ‘-depth’ explicitly during those earlier test runs.

See Cleaning Up for a deeper discussion about good use cases of the ‘-delete’ action and those with surprising results.

The ‘-delete’ action will fail to remove a directory unless it is empty.

Together with the ‘-ignore_readdir_race’ option, find will ignore errors of the ‘-delete’ action in the case the file has disappeared since the parent directory was read: it will not output an error diagnostic, not change the exit code to nonzero, and the return code of the ‘-delete’ action will be true.