osx - mv command says "No such file or directory"

06
2014-04

Jeremy H.

I am attempting to rename a directory on an external hard drive on Mac OS X. When I tried in the finder I got an error that says, "An unexpected error occurred (error code -43)." -- so I thought I may be able to do it from the Terminal.

I tried this mv untitled\ folder/ RED but it comes back and says mv: rename untitled folder/ to RED: No such file or directory

I see the directory in finder and when I perform a ls command.

I am not sure what else I can try. OS X doesn't seem to want to let me do anything with this directory.

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pioto

The previous answer is almost correct. However, you shouldn't quote the shell glob characters if you want them to work. So, this is the command you're looking for:

rm -rf "/target/directory with spaces/"*

Note that the * is outside of the double quotes. This form would also work:

rm -rf /target/directory\ with\ spaces/*

If you have the * in quotes as shown above, then it will only attempt to remove the single file literally named * inside the target directory.

quack quixote

Three more options.

Use find with -mindepth 1 and -delete:

−mindepth levels
Do not apply any tests or actions at levels less than levels (a non‐negative integer).
−mindepth 1 means process all files except the command line arguments.

-delete
Delete files; true if removal succeeded. If the removal failed, an error message is issued. If −delete fails, find’s exit status will be nonzero (when it eventually exits). Use of −delete automatically turns on the −depth option.
Test carefully with the -depth option before using this option.
```
# optimal?
# -xdev      don't follow links to other filesystems
find '/target/dir with spaces/' -xdev -mindepth 1 -delete


# Sergey's version
# -xdev      don't follow links to other filesystems
# -depth    process depth-first not breadth-first
find '/target/dir with spaces/' -xdev -depth -mindepth1 -exec rm -rf {} \;
```

2. Use find, but with files, not directories. This avoids the need to rm -rf:

    # delete all the files;
    find '/target/dir with spaces/' -type f -exec rm {} \;

    # then get all the dirs but parent
    find '/target/dir with spaces/' -mindepth 1 -depth -type d -exec rmdir {} \;

    # near-equivalent, slightly easier for new users to remember
    find '/target/dir with spaces/' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm
    find '/target/dir with spaces/' -mindepth 1 -depth -type d -print0 | xargs -0 rmdir

3. Go ahead and remove the parent directory, but recreate it. You could create a bash function to do this with one command; here's a simple one-liner:

    rm -rf '/target/dir with spaces' ; mkdir '/target/dir with spaces'

KeithB

How about

rm -rf /target/directory\ path/*

If there may be files starting with . in the target directory.

rm -rf "/target/directory path/*" "/target/directory path/.??*"

This second will match everything starting with a ., except . and .. It will fail on names like .a, but that isn't very common. It could be tweaked if necessary to cover all of the cases.

Sergey

find /target/directory/ -xdev -depth -mindepth 1 -exec rm -Rf {} \;

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osx - mv command says "No such file or directory"