Handle gsutil ls and rm command errors if no files present

You might not want to ignore all errors as it might indicate something different that file not found. With the following script you'll ignore only the 'One or more URLs matched not objects' but will inform you of a different error. And if there is no error it will just delete the file:

gsutil -m rm gs://mybucket/subbucket/* 2> temp
if [ $? == 1 ]; then
    grep 'One or more URLs matched no objects' temp
    if [ $? == 0 ]; then
        echo "no such file"
    else
        echo temp
    fi
fi
rm temp

This will pipe stderr to a temp file and will check the message to decide whether to ignore it or show it.

And it also works for single file deletions. I hope it helps.

Refs:

How to grep standard error stream
Bash Reference Manual - Redirections

You may like rsync to sync files and folders to a bucket. I used this for clearing a folder in a bucket and replacing it with new files from my build script.

gsutil rsync -d newdata gs://mybucket/data - replaces data folder with newdata

Try this:

gsutil -m rm gs://mybucket/foo/* 2> /dev/null || true

Or:

gsutil -m ls gs://mybucket/foo/* 2> /dev/null || true

This has the effect of suppressing stderr (it's directed to /dev/null), and returning a success error code even on failure.