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ylluminate
Asked: 2012-04-29 10:12:05 +0800 CST

How to delete empty source directories when moving folders with rsync?

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rsync can be coaxed into moving folders very similarly and superiorly to traditional mv with the following options:

rsync -axvvES --remove-source-files source_directory /destination/

However one thing I cannot yet seem to get it to do is to remove original directories. The --remove-source-files flag does just that, removes the source files, but not also source directories. I wish there were a --remove-source-directories flag as well, but there's not.

How can I deal with this? I suppose I can just issue an rm -fr after the move, however I'd prefer to keep the procedure all in one process vs introducing a potential for mistakes.

bash rsync shell zsh

4 Answers

  1. I ended up in a similar situation. I wanted to avoid rm -rf, knowing that rsync failed to copy some files, and I didn't want to loose them.

    To simply delete the empty directories, I found this one the most convenient (from sourcedir):

    find . -type d -empty -delete
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  2. Using "rm -rf" has an inherent race condition, you could namely delete files that were just created between the rsync and the rm invocations.

    I prefer to use:

    rsync --remove-source-files -a server:incoming/ incoming/ && 
ssh server find incoming -depth -type d -delete

    This will NOT remove the directories if they are not empty.

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  3. Best Answer

    I haven't found a command that does that in one go, but since rsync still performs better than rm -rf (specially if you have a very large number of directories) here are two rsync command that do a "move":

    rsync -av --ignore-existing --remove-source-files source/ destination/ && \
rsync -av --delete `mktemp -d`/ source/ && rmdir source/
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  4. Why not just add rm -rf source_directory after your rsync ?

    rsync -axvvES --remove-source-files source_directory /destination/ && rm -rf source_directory

    Each command-line program is (idealy) made to do a specified task, and it's up to you to glue several together to accomplish more complex tasks.

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