One possibility is to instead of deleting the files, truncating them instead to 0 bytes - feel like hacking up docpurge to do that?
#! /bin/sh # Copyright (C) 2006 Nokia Corporation. # # Contact: Marius Vollmer <marius.vollmer@nokia.com> # # This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or # modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License # version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. # # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but # WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU # General Public License for more details. # # You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License # along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software # Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA # 02110-1301 USA # Real hackers don't read docs. # PURGE="/usr/share/doc/ /usr/share/man/ /usr/share/info/" #the below is a lot faster than the for loop below but it prints **** to stdout #find $PURGE ! -type d -exec dd if=/dev/zero of='{}' bs=1b count=0 \; for f in `find $PURGE ! -type d `; do rm -rf $f touch $f done for d in $PURGE; do echo "Purged by docpurge" >$d/README done