sudo rm -rf directory/* does not work with certain permission settings

Question

I have a directory /var/opt/gitlab/backups with the following permissions:

[user@localhost ~]$ sudo ls -la /var/opt/gitlab/backups
total 1316296
drwx------.  2 git  root         63 1月  21 21:44 .
drwxr-xr-x. 21 root root       4096 1月  21 21:39 ..
-rw-------.  1 git  git  1347880960 1月  21 21:44 1642819457_2022_01_21_14.1.2-ee_gitlab_backup.tar

Now the following command does not remove anything

sudo rm -rf /var/opt/gitlab/backups/*

While the following command removes the directory and everything inside

sudo rm -rf /var/opt/gitlab/backups/

Also the following command will remove the specific file

sudo rm -rf /var/opt/gitlab/backups/1642819457_2022_01_21_14.1.2-ee_gitlab_backup.tar

It's only the file wildcard way does not work (which unfortunately is what I want)

However what I want is only removing the files inside and not removing the directory. I suspect it's because of the permission settings but changing the permissions is not an option for me. The directory owner and permissions are set automatically by a third-party software and I would like not to mess around.

Is there any way to achieve the "removing all files inside the directory but not the directory itself" effect?

What's the error message you are getting? – Abdelhakim AKODADI Jan 22 '22 at 03:24 — Abdelhakim AKODADI, Jan 22 '22 at 03:24
There is no error message. Just does not remove anything. – cr001 Jan 22 '22 at 03:28 — cr001, Jan 22 '22 at 03:28
What happens when you remove the r from the -rf? – Abdelhakim AKODADI Jan 22 '22 at 03:33 — Abdelhakim AKODADI, Jan 22 '22 at 03:33
It's the same effect. No error and nothing removed. – cr001 Jan 22 '22 at 03:35 — cr001, Jan 22 '22 at 03:35

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 22 '22 at 03:34

Wildcards are expanded by your shell. In order for

rm /var/opt/gitlab/backups/*

to work, then you must have permission to list the contents of /var/opt/gitlab/backups/. Consider for example as a non-root user I run this command:

$ echo /var/*
/var/cache /var/db /var/empty /var/lib /var/lock /var/log /var/mail /var/run /var/spool /var/svc.d /var/tmp

Then the shell expands the * to the list of non-hidden files in that directory, then echo prints those values.

However, if I try to do the same thing with a directory that I don't have the ability to access:

$ echo /root/*
/root/*

The shell doesn't have permission to enumerate the content, and therefore cannot expand the *.

If you really must use the wildcard, then you can try:

$ sudo /bin/sh -c 'rm -rf /var/opt/gitlab/backups/*'

With that, you run a new shell (/bin/sh) as root. That shell will have permission to read the content of the directory and can expand * to the contents.

sudo rm -rf directory/* does not work with certain permission settings

1 Answers1