How can I recursively find a directory by name and delete its contents (including all sub-directories and files) while keeping the directory itself?

Question

Given:

1. I have a tree structure with folders EmptyMe on different levels
2. EmptyMe directories contain sub-directories and files

Required:

1. Empty contents of EmptyMe directories (including their sub-directories), while keeping those directories (not deleting them).

Question:

What's the Unix command to recursively find all EmptyMe directories from current level and delete all of their contents (including sub-directories), while keeping EmptyMe directories on the disc?

My attempt:

$ find . -name 'EmptyMe' -type d -exec rm -- {} +
rm: cannot remove `./a/b/c/d/EmptyMe': Is a directory

As you can see, that command attempted to remove EmptyMe, as opposed to its contents.

Answer 1

Test run:

find . -path '*/EmptyMe/*'

Real deletion:

find . -path '*/EmptyMe/*' -delete

-path '*/EmptyMe/*' means match all items that are in a directory called EmptyMe.

Answer 2

One option that can be used is to nest the commands:

find . -type d -name 'EmptyMe'  -exec find {} -mindepth 1 -delete \;

The outer find -type d -name 'EmptyMe' locates the required directories, and runs the inner find command via -exec ... \;. The inner command descends into the found directory (referenced via {} ) and since we're using -delete flag here, it should follow depth-first search, removing files and then subdirectories.

Answer 3

This works, but it gives errors if EmptyMe directories are empty.

find . -name 'EmptyMe' -type d -exec sh -c 'rm -r -- "$1"/*' sh {} \;

Error example:

rm: cannot remove ‘./EmptyMe/*’: No such file or directory