rm -rf does not delete folder contents but instead creates another empty one

Question

I'm currently writing a start script for a minecraft game server. In this script I included a backup script.

This backup script works almost perfect but instead of deleting a folders contents it just creates another one (similarilly named) and does not do anything with the targeted folder.

I'm using this command: rm -rf "$MINECRAFT_PATH/server.log backups/*"
This command is executed in a bash script.

The variable $MINECRAFT_PATH does contain the correct path. The folder created has this name: server.log.backups (Note the dot between log and backups). But the targeted folder has this name: server.log backups. This folder does exist and this is not the problem.

Answer 1

Double quotes in Bash preserve most literal values of the content, so your * glob is passed literally to rm, which will try to remove a file or folder called *. The $MINECRAFT_PATH is substituted though.

What you probably want is:

rm -rf "$MINECRAFT_PATH/server.log backups/"*

This will delete the contents of the server.log backups folder.

Some alternatives:

• You could program your script more defensively, thus removing the -f option for rm. In that case, it would fail if the server.log backups folder was empty, because the glob would not be expanded and passed on literally, and there would be no file called server.log backups/*.

• You could simply rm -rf the entire folder and mkdir -p it afterwards.

• Or, you could also simply do a depth-first deletion of all the files and folders inside the server.log backups folder. -mindepth 1 prevents the parent from being deleted:

  find "$MINECRAFT_PATH/server.log backups" -mindepth 1 -depth -delete