What command sequence can I use to delete directories but not their files?

Question

How do I delete directories but not the files inside them? I have tried the following:

rm -di /Users/arthur/Desktop/MyFolder 

remove /Users/arthur/Desktop/MyFolder? y
rm: /Users/arthur/Desktop/MyFolder: Directory not empty

I'm on a Mac. BTW, I want to do this automatically.

Answer 1

Method 1 – First moving, then deleting

Just move the files up one directory and then delete it. This will keep the contained file/folder hierarchy.

mv ~/Desktop/MyFolder/* ~/Desktop/MyFolder/..
rmdir ~/Desktop/MyFolder

---

Method 2 – Automating in a Shell Function

You can put this into a shell function defined in your ~/.bash_profile:

function rmd () {
  if [ -d "$1" ]; then
    mv "$1"/* "$1"/..
    rmdir "$1"
  else
    echo "$1 is not a directory"
  fi
}

As said before, this will only delete the parent folder, keeping the children hierarchy intact.

---

Method 3 – Recursive deletion

If you want to recursively remove all folders and just keep files contained, use the following instead:

function rmdr () {
  if [ -d "$1" ]; then
    p="$1"/..
    find "$1" -type f -exec mv '{}' "$p" \;
    rm -rf "$1"
  else
    echo "$1 is not a directory"
  fi
}

Note that this overwrites files with duplicate names.

---

Method 4 – Recursive deletion with duplicate awareness

Finally, if you want to keep duplicate files, you can check if they already exist. In this case, we'll prepend them with a random number string. Of course, there could be way more sophisticated methods than that, but you can see where this is going.

function rmdr () {
  if [ -d "$1" ]; then
    p="$1"/..
    # loop through all files
    while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do
      filename=$(basename "$file")
      # if it already exists, prefix with random number
      if [ -f "$p/$filename" ]; then
        mv "$file" "$p/$RANDOM-$filename"
      # if it doesn't exist, just move
      else
        mv "$file" "$p"
      fi
    done < <(find "$1" -type f -print0)
    # remove parent directory
    rm -rf "$1"
  else
    echo "$1 is not a directory"
  fi
}

Looping through find output is explained here.