Hadoop: rmdir: remove empty directory

“rmdir” command is used to remove a directory.

Usage:

hadoop fs [generic options] -rmdir [--ignore-fail-on-non-empty] <dir> ...

--ignore-fail-on-non-empty: When using wildcards, do not fail if a directory still contains files.

 

Let me try to delete a non-empty folder.

$hadoop fs -ls /user/cloudera/demo1
Found 5 items
-rw-r--r--   1 cloudera cloudera          2 2022-03-22 23:58 /user/cloudera/demo1/a.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 cloudera cloudera    6166736 2022-03-22 23:57 /user/cloudera/demo1/atlas.docx
-rw-r--r--   1 cloudera cloudera    9147128 2022-03-22 23:57 /user/cloudera/demo1/atlasClient.docx
-rw-r--r--   1 cloudera cloudera    6988969 2022-03-22 23:58 /user/cloudera/demo1/gradle.docx
-rw-r--r--   1 cloudera cloudera    8986359 2022-03-22 23:58 /user/cloudera/demo1/maven.docx
$
$hadoop fs -rmdir /user/cloudera/demo1
rmdir: `/user/cloudera/demo1': Directory is not empty

As you see the above output, Hadoop throws the error 'Directory is not empty'.

Let me try to delete an empty directory.

$hadoop fs -mkdir /user/cloudera/demo4
$
$hadoop fs -ls /user/cloudera
Found 3 items
drwxr-xr-x   - cloudera cloudera          0 2022-03-23 07:17 /user/cloudera/demo1
drwxr-xr-x   - cloudera cloudera          0 2022-03-23 07:03 /user/cloudera/demo2
drwxr-xr-x   - cloudera cloudera          0 2022-03-23 07:53 /user/cloudera/demo4
$
$hadoop fs -rmdir /user/cloudera/demo4
$
$hadoop fs -ls /user/cloudera
Found 2 items
drwxr-xr-x   - cloudera cloudera          0 2022-03-23 07:17 /user/cloudera/demo1
drwxr-xr-x   - cloudera cloudera          0 2022-03-23 07:03 /user/cloudera/demo2

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