Remove directory in ftp

Question

This is probably very simple, but I really can't get it to work. I have an old directory with a symlink in it. I need to delete the directory, but it says it is not empty when I try:

rm -f dirname  

(I have also tried -r, and -rf)

I get: "usage: rmdir directory-name"

So then I try rmdir -f dirname, but I get the same response. I am a newb to the command line and would really appreciate if someone could help.

Answer 1

Two things come to mind:

(1) did you check the directory to make sure it's really empty? Did you look for hidden files with

ls -a?

hidden files: files with a name that start with . and don't show with regular ls. If you do find some, delete them and try your command again.

(2) try rm -fR dirname

Answer 2

To find any lagging files under testing/ and get rid of them.

find testing/ -type f -exec rm -f {} \;

Sometimes files or symlinks can get created that contain special characters and those can stymie our attempts to remove them using common tools.

Then, do the same for directories:

find testing/ -type d -exec rm -f {} \;

After that, testing/ should be empty and you should be able to rmdir it.

Answer 3

Before you can remove the directory, you need to remove the file that's in it.

rm testing/name_of_the_symbolic_link
rmdir testing

If there are many files, you need to remove them all.

If you want the convenience of familiar command line or GUI file manipulation tools to manipulate files over FTP, you can mount the FTP directory as a filesystem. Some OSes have this feature integrated in their GUI (for example, Ubuntu does as far as I recall); I don't know about OSX. You can mount the FTP directory on the command line using CurlFtpFS.

mkdir ~/mnt
curlftpfs ftp://ftp.example.com/remote/path ~/mnt
rm -r ~/mnt/testing
fusermount -u ~/mnt

Answer 4

Try this command:

rmdir -f dirname