Cfrtjryk

I have a little script that have to remove some files.
How can I manage the device or resource busy error of rm?
Can I catch it? Like a try/catch?
So that if I catch it I, for example, sleep 3 seconds and then retry..

Thanks

If it's an error that you think will go away after some time, then you could try a simple loop:

while ! rm some files; do

    echo 'rm failed, sleeping for 5 seconds'

    sleep 5

    echo 'retrying...'

done

If you want to catch THAT specific error, try to probe the error code 16 on your last rm execution. Example:

rm /path/to/foo

if [ $? -eq 16 ]; then

    echo "Device busy"

fi

$? is the special shell variable that means "exit state of the last command". If this state is zero 0, means that the last command succeded, and if different than zero means failure and it maps to an error message. All error messages are available at Linux source file linux/include/uapi/asm-generic/errno-base.h, and 16 is:

#define EBUSY       16  /* Device or resource busy */

If you want to deal with the proccess that is causing the open file error lsof +D /path/too/foo/ will show what files are opened inside that directory. lsof(8) manpage.

Related stuff:

• Device or resource busy


• How to get over “device or resource busy”?


• Meaning of $? in shell scripts