How to prevent rm from reporting that a file was not found?

bash rm
Village picture Village · Apr 20, 2012 · Viewed 123k times · Source

I am using rm within a BASH script to delete many files. Sometimes the files are not present, so it reports many errors. I do not need this message. I have searched the man page for a command to make rm quiet, but the only option I found is -f, which from the description, "ignore nonexistent files, never prompt", seems to be the right choice, but the name does not seem to fit, so I am concerned it might have unintended consequences.

  • Is the -f option the correct way to silence rm? Why isn't it called -q?
  • Does this option do anything else?

Answer

chepner picture chepner · Apr 20, 2012

The main use of -f is to force the removal of files that would not be removed using rm by itself (as a special case, it "removes" non-existent files, thus suppressing the error message).

You can also just redirect the error message using

$ rm file.txt 2> /dev/null

(or your operating system's equivalent). You can check the value of $? immediately after calling rm to see if a file was actually removed or not.

Related questions

How to delete multiple files at once in Bash on Linux?

I have this list of files on a Linux server: abc.log.2012-03-14 abc.log.2012-03-27 abc.log.2012-03-28 abc.log.2012-03-29 abc.log.2012-03-30 abc.log.2012-04-02 abc.log.2012-04-04 abc.log.2012…

Read More
Remove all files except some from a directory

When using sudo rm -r, how can I delete all files, with the exception of the following: textfile.txt backup.tar.gz script.php database.sql info.txt

Read More
Linux why can't I pipe find result to rm?

sorry if this is a noobie question but I can't find a good answer. To find then remove something I can use find . -name ".txt" -exec rm "{}" \; But why can't I just pipe the results to rm like find . -name ".…

Read More