find and delete gives false status

Question

I tried to execute delete as per many previous discussions occurred find & delete

however my attempts lead to different experience.

find . -type d -name "koko" -exec rm -rf {} \;

deletes the folder named koko but give me false alarm

find: ./koko: No such file or directory

what is supposively going wrong at my terminal.

I am using tcsh , and -delete switch with find doesn't work well.

here is the snapshot of

Answer 1

If you use the -prune option as suggested in this answer, the error message doesn't occur.

Quoting from the above answer,

Use -prune on the directories that you're going to delete anyway to tell find not to bother trying to find files in them.

Testing

mkdir koko
cd koko
touch file{1,2}
cd ..
find . -type d -name "koko" -prune -exec rm -rf {} \;

After I execute the above find command, I get the prompt without any error. However, if I do not use the -prune option, I get the same error as you mention.

Answer 2

The problem is that find has found a directory, it matches your selection and then the command is executed. However, find wants to do what comes naturally, and that's recursing through a directory tree, but the directory it's just found has disappeared! Hence the error message.

You can work around this by supplying the --depth option, which means process each directory's contents before the directory itself. The manpage also mentions that the -delete option also implies this option, which is for the above reason.