What is causing "Directory not empty" errors?

Question

I've written a script that is mostly working for me. However, the two rmdir commands at the end are sometimes returning Directory not empty errors. How do I beat this? I tried adding r and then -rf which returned Illegal option errors.

I'm a rookie, and I'd be grateful for any help. Here is the full shell script, which, again, is mostly working beautifully:

if [[ -z "${1}" ]]; then
  die "FolderName Required"
fi

newDirName="DirectoryName"
newBaseDir="/Users/JSG/Desktop/DataFarm/$1/"
/bin/mkdir -p $newBaseDir/{ProtectedOrig,Data}

echo -n "---Data Folder Setup

---Data Introduction

---Data Audit/Manipulation

---Data Queries" > $newBaseDir/Data/$1_DataJournal.txt

ditto NewData/ NewDataCopy
fab deploy_data_to_s3:data=*
mv NewData/ $newBaseDir/ProtectedOrig/NewData
mv NewDataCopy/ $newBaseDir/Data/NewDataCopy 
mv $newBaseDir/Data/NewDataCopy/* $newBaseDir/Data/
rmdir $newBaseDir/Data/NewDataCopy
mv $newBaseDir/ProtectedOrig/NewData/* $newBaseDir/ProtectedOrig/
rmdir $newBaseDir/ProtectedOrig/NewData
chflags -R uchg $newBaseDir/ProtectedOrig/
mkdir NewData

What am I missing? And thanks in advance!

Solution 1

For the rmdir command, you need to add the --ignore-fail-on-non-empty flag so it deletes the directory even if files are in there like so:

rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty $newBaseDir/Data/NewDataCopy

You could also just use rm -r too:

rm -r $newBaseDir/Data/NewDataCopy

From the Wikipedia Entry:

rmdir will not remove a directory if it is not empty in UNIX. The correct way to remove a directory and all its contents recursively is with the rm command.

Solution 2

Check for any files in the directory that start with .. I note you're moving *, but if there's a file called, for example, .hello, then * will not match this file and as a result the directory will not be empty when you come to do an rmdir.

Comments

[Jeff Severns Guntzel]

Added rm -r and it now the script works like a charm. However, ignore-fail-on-non-empty returned Illegal option errors. Any idea why? And thank you very, very much.

[Suhail Patel]

Possibly that flag was deprecated or not used on Unix anymore. Using rm -r is the preferred way anyway for removing a directory which is empty or even non-empty.