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

Question

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.

Different volumes and I need to preserve all attributes, including times. — ylluminate, Apr 28 '12 at 20:12
I'm very surprised rsync has no option for this, especially when it does at the destination side. I end up doing `find . -type d -empty | xargs rmdir -p` — Sridhar Sarnobat, May 07 '19 at 02:24
You know @Sridhar-Sarnobat I can't help but wonder if there's a way to pass results from an `rsync` session into a list that is then processed following the process that then cleans it up... Hmm. — ylluminate, May 07 '19 at 02:27

score 12 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 20 '19 at 13:24

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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

answered Jun 20 '19 at 13:24

lp_

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Yep, thank goodness for -empty, which I only found out recently and it's become very common for me to use. – Sridhar Sarnobat Aug 26 '19 at 19:37
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Thank @lp_ This one should be updated as the best answer – juanesarango Mar 24 '21 at 21:50

Raúl Salinas-Monteagudo · Answer 2 · 2021-02-11T10:06:13.177

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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.

edited Feb 11 '21 at 10:06

answered Mar 24 '15 at 16:36

Raúl Salinas-Monteagudo

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Note you apparently may need to add `-depth` on OSX or others. – Charlie Gorichanaz Apr 27 '17 at 20:08
Thanks @CharlieGorichanaz, done – Raúl Salinas-Monteagudo Feb 11 '21 at 10:06

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 07 '13 at 22:20

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/

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 29 '12 at 01:33

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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.

answered Apr 29 '12 at 01:33

Gregory MOUSSAT

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I think you're right. I believe I ultimately have to drill down to the bottom as well first as I cannot get caught just moving the way rsync normally does. Probably need to use `find -depth`. Would you have any suggestion as to a quick algorithmic approach to getting down to the bottom of the dir stack, mv'ing with rsync, rm'ing as you note, and then stepping back up the tree? – ylluminate Apr 29 '12 at 04:48

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

4 Answers4