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

Question

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

User · Answer

rm -f file will never report not found

User · Answer

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 gt   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

User · Answer

I had same issue for cshell  The only solution I had was to create a dummy file that matched pattern before  rm  in my script

User · Answer

As far as rm -f doing  anything else   it does force  -f is shorthand for --force  silent removal in situations where rm would otherwise ask you for confirmation  For example  when trying to remove a file not writable by you from a directory that is writable by you

User · Answer

Yes  -f is the most suitable option for this

User · Answer

-f is the correct flag  but for the test operator  not rm    -f   THEFILE     amp  amp  rm   THEFILE    this ensures that the file exists and is a regular file  not a directory  device node etc

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

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