How to check if a file is empty in Bash?

I have a file called diff.txt. Want to check if it is empty. Did something like this but couldn't get it working.

if [ -s diff.txt ]
then
        touch empty.txt
        rm full.txt
else
        touch full.txt
        rm emtpy.txt
fi

Misspellings are irritating, aren't they? Check your spelling of empty, but then also try this:

#!/bin/bash -e

if [ -s diff.txt ]
then
        rm -f empty.txt
        touch full.txt
else
        rm -f full.txt
        touch empty.txt
fi

I like shell scripting a lot, but one disadvantage of it is that the shell cannot help you when you misspell, whereas a compiler like your C++ compiler can help you.

Notice incidentally that I have swapped the roles of empty.txt and full.txt, as @Matthias suggests.

mickey white

[ -s file.name ] || echo "file is empty"

[[ -s file ]] --> Checks if file has size greater than 0

if [[ -s diff.txt ]]; then echo "file has something"; else echo "file is empty"; fi

If needed, this checks all the *.txt files in the current directory; and reports all the empty file:

for file in *.txt; do if [[ ! -s $file ]]; then echo $file; fi; done

While the other answers are correct, using the "-s" option will also show the file is empty even if the file does not exist.
By adding this additional check "-f" to see if the file exists first, we ensure the result is correct.

if [ -f diff.txt ]
then
  if [ -s diff.txt ]
  then
    rm -f empty.txt
    touch full.txt
  else
    rm -f full.txt
    touch empty.txt
  fi
else
  echo "File diff.txt does not exist"
fi

@geedoubleya answer is my favorite.

However, I do prefer this

if [[ -f diff.txt && -s diff.txt ]]
then
  rm -f empty.txt
  touch full.txt
elif [[ -f diff.txt && ! -s diff.txt ]]
then
  rm -f full.txt
  touch empty.txt
else
  echo "File diff.txt does not exist"
fi

Many of the answers are correct but I feel like they could be more complete / simplistic etc. for example :

# BASH4+ example on Linux :

typeset read_file="/tmp/some-file.txt"
if [ ! -s "${read_file}" ]  || [ ! -f "${read_file}" ] ;then
    echo "Error: file (${read_file}) not found.. "
    exit 7
fi

if $read_file is empty or not there stop the show with exit. More than once I have had misread the top answer here to mean the opposite.

I came here looking for how to delete empty __init__.py files as they are implicit in Python 3.3+ and ended up using:

find -depth '(' -type f  -name __init__.py ')' -print0 |
  while IFS= read -d '' -r file; do if [[ ! -s $file ]]; then rm $file; fi; done

Also (at least in zsh) using $path as the variable also breaks your $PATH env and so it'll break your open shell. Anyway, thought I'd share!

[[ -f filename && ! -s filename ]] && echo "filename exists and is empty"

To check if file is empty or has only white spaces, you can use grep:

if [[ -z $(grep '[^[:space:]]' $filename) ]] ; then
  echo "Empty file" 
  ...
fi

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9964823/how-to-check-if-a-file-is-empty-in-bash

标签

bash

if-statement

file-handling

is-empty