Follow-up Comment #5, bug #42985 (project findutils): Thank you a lot for explanations - I am sure they will be valuable for everyone who encounters similar error from `find rm`.
It also helped me to create following test case for huge amount of input data, in which the suggestions don't seem to help. Warning: the script puts high load on filesystem, so use it only in good test environment. mkdir -p 42985 ( set -e cd 42985 echo creating many folders for i in {1..10000}; do n=$(echo $i | md5sum); n=${n%% *}; mkdir $n; touch $n/$n $n/${n}1 $n/${n}2 ; done > /dev/null cpat='.sst' if ! find $(pwd) . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -regex $cpat -prune -o -exec rm -rfv {} \+ >/dev/null 2>../error.log ; then echo "there were errors:" head ../error.log else echo success fi ) The produced output in my environment: creating many folders there were errors: find: ‘./041f49053a1b6be294e4149b75b997b4’: No such file or directory find: ‘./1b6bbdb9e57e72c47bca951947563fc9’: No such file or ... Please let me know if this looks like valid bug and whether I should create dedicated report for it. (I know the workaround will be using unique entries in input folder list or handing one folder per call, just hopefully find can manage this job anyway). _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?42985> _______________________________________________ Message sent via/by Savannah http://savannah.gnu.org/