Bash – How to delete empty source directories when moving folders with rsync

bashrsyncshellzsh

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.

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/

Related Solutions

Rsync and –remove-source-files – Efficient File Management

You could always delete them manually with something like this:

find /path/to/directory -depth -type d -print0 \
    | xargs --null --no-run-if-empty rmdir --

This will only delete empty directories.

Linux NTFS to NTFS rsync Recopying Files – Solution

As per my second update, the permissions of my user did not allow me to set times. Running the rsync using the root account on the destination machine, along with --modify-window=5 gave me suitable behaviour. (If you don't have root access on the destination, the -u flag could help, but only if you're sure no-one will change the files on the remote system.)

Best Answer

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Rsync and –remove-source-files – Efficient File Management

Linux NTFS to NTFS rsync Recopying Files – Solution

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