Using find to delete all subdirectories (and their files)

bash recursion find subdirectory rm
infmz picture infmz · May 5, 2011 · Viewed 14.9k times · Source

I'm sure this is straight forward and answered somewhere, but I didn't manage to find what I was looking for. Basically, I'm trying to run a cron script to clear the contents of a given directory every 7 days. So far I have tried the following,

find /myDir -mtime 7 -exec rm -rf {} \;

This however also deletes the parent directory myDir, which I do not want. I also tried,

find /myDir -type f -type d -mtime 7 -delete

which appeared to do nothing. I also tried,

fnd /myDir -type d -delete

which deleted all but the parent directory just as I need. However, a warning message came up reading,

relative path potentially not safe

I'd appreciate if anyone can rectify my script so that it safely deletes all subdirectories in folder.

Many thanks. =)

UPDATE: I decided to go for the following,

find /myDir -mindepth 1 -mtime 7 -delete

Based upon what I learned from all who replied. Again, many thanks to you all.

Answer

linuts picture linuts · May 5, 2011

Try:

find /myDir -mindepth 1 -mtime 7 -exec rm -rf {} \;

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