Finding Empty Directories

[kenrbnsn]

I need help finding and listing empty directories.

Yes, I know I can do a ls -R | more and eye ball the list, but I am likely to miss at least one if the list is long.

Thanks in advance.

Ken

 

[ericbrunson]

Just rmdir all the directories. If there's anything in them the removal will fail.

 

[kenrbnsn]

No, I don't want to find them to remove them. I want to get a list of them.

 

[ericbrunson]

I don't know where I got that from... in any case, you'll have to write a script that walks the directory tree and looks to see if directory is empty.

This works in bash and ksh:

find $1 -type d | while read dir ; do
    [[ $( ls -1a "$dir" | wc -l ) == 2 ]] && echo $dir is empty
done

 

[olded]

I had this problem myself awhile back:

#!/bin/ksh

function lls { ls -1 ${1:+"$@"} 2>/dev/null; }

function is_dir_empty { [[ ! -d $1 || -z "$(lls -A $1)" ]] ;}


find . -type d | while read dir ; do
is_dir_empty $dir && echo $dir is empty
done