find: Delete with exclude

Question

This command is not DWIM-compliant:

find . \( -name .svn -prune -false \) -o \( -empty -delete \)
find: The -delete action atomatically turns on -depth, but -prune 
      does nothing when -depth is in effect.  If you want to 
      carry on anyway, just explicitly use the -depth option.

Adding -depth disables the effect of -prune, which means .svn directories are also deleted. So: Which find syntax (if any) can be used to prune and then delete some of the non-pruned paths, without using other tools like rm?

Answer 1

You can use -path, it's not POSIX but supported by many implementations :

find . \! -path "*/.svn/*" -empty -delete

-regex is an option too.

Answer 2

If whitespace is not a problem, something like this will work

find . \( -name .svn -prune -false \) -o -print | tac | xargs -L rm -f

The advantage of this approach is that it's a big performance win when the parts of the tree we're avoiding with -prune are large. The downside is that -delete will delete things as soon as it sees a leaf, but this command has to wait until find exits. So if there is a lot of stuff to delete, but not much of the search space was pruned, it may not be a win.