Catch "rm: fts_read: No such file or directory" error and continue

Question

I goofed my Macbook real good. I moved some Time Machine backups from my external drive into Trash and quickly realized that was a horrible mistake. I can't put them back and I can't delete them. So far I've been running rm with a helper function called bypass that is allowing me to skirt Apple's protection of deleting backups.

Anyways, I have a command

sudo /System/Library/Extensions/TMSafetyNet.kext/Contents/Helpers/bypass rm -rfv /Volumes/*/.Trashes

which for brevity can be referred to as

sudo bypass rm -rfv /Volumes/*/.Trashes

that keeps randomly getting interrupted by rm: fts_read: No such file or directory. I think fts_read is essentially a UNIX kernel function that gets into filespace and is read as a file during very verbose recursive rm calls. So I want to catch fts_read and restart my sudo bypass rm -rfv /Volumes/*/.Trashes. I don't know bash that well, but here's some pseudocode of my thoughts:

try:
  sudo bypass rm -rfv /Volumes/*/.Trashes
except 'rm: fts_read: No such file or directory':
  sudo bypass rm -rfv /Volumes/*/.Trashes

Basically right now I'm manually restarting the command every time I get the error, but this process is taking dozens of hours so it'd be nice if it could restart itself.

I'm not sure, although perhaps try wrapping your commands in something like python? That way you can utilize try/catch and still make command line `exec` calls @ebaynaud — Frank, Aug 28 '19 at 20:25

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 21 '18 at 19:58

One possible option could be a while loop that requires the failure of the previous command? example:

counter=0
cd "not a real place" #get the initial error code
while [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; do
    echo 'words'
    (( counter++ ))
    (( counter > 10 ))
done

This will keep going until (( counter > 10 )) returns 0, i.e., evaluates to true. You should be able to do something similar with your command:

sudo bypass rm -rfv /Volumes/*/.Trashes
while [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; do
    sudo bypass rm -rfv /Volumes/*/.Trashes
done

I doubt this is a good solution, but it's a solution.

Catch "rm: fts_read: No such file or directory" error and continue

1 Answers1