Question

Need a script to delete all files in a directory then email once complete, I have the below as a template but unsure if this will work – of course no email component has been added!

#!/bin/sh
DIR="/var/www/public_html/docs/files/"
LIST=`ls -l $DIR | grep -v "total 0"`
FILES=`ls $DIR`
cd $DIR
if [ -z "$LIST" ]
then
  exit
else
  echo "Files Delete:"
  echo $FILES
  rm -f *
fi

Update:

#!/bin/sh
DIR="/home/test/test/docs/test/"
cd $DIR
rm -f *

Answer 1

Some notes:

You use all-caps DIR, LIST and FILES, but all-caps variables in shell scripts are, by convention, environment variables. You should use e.g.

dir='/var/www/public_html/docs/files/'

instead.

To find how many files are in a directory use

find "$dir" -maxdepth 1 -type f | wc -l

You use both LIST and FILES; it seems like you’re tring to find out if there are any files before deleting them. There’s no point to this from a functionality point of view but if you must conditionally echo the list of files it’s better to make the decision this way.

if [ $(find "$dir" -type f | wc -l) -gt 0 ] ; then
    echo Files Delete:
    find "$dir" -printf '%f '
fi

Although you should be aware that this output cannot be reliably used to reconstruct the actual file names.

To actually delete the files you should again use find

find "$dir" -maxdepth 1 -type f -delete

Putting it all together

dir='/var/www/public_html/docs/files/'

if [ $(find "$dir" -type f | wc -l) -gt 0 ] ; then
    echo Files Delete:
    find "$dir" -maxdepth 1 -type f  -printf '%f ' -delete
fi

Here I have combined the “print files” and “delete files” steps into a single invocation of find.