Finding empty directories UNIX

Question

I need to find empty directories for a given list of directories. Some directories have directories inside it.

If inside directories are also empty I can say main di

Answer 1

find . -type d -empty

finds and lists empty directories and sub-directories in the current tree. E.g. resulting list of empty dirs and subdirs:

./2047
./2032
./2049
./2063
./NRCP26LUCcct1/2039
./NRCP26LUCcct1/2054
./NRCP26LUCcct1/2075
./NRCP26LUCcct1/2070

No operation is made on the directories. They are simply listed. This works for me.

Answer 2

It depends a little on what you want to do with the empty directories. I use the command below when I wish to delete all empty directories within a tree, say test directory.

find test -depth -empty -delete

One thing to notice about the command above is that it will also remove empty files, so use the -type d option to avoid that.

find test -depth -type d -empty -delete

Drop -delete to see the files and directories matched.

If your definition of an empty directory tree is that it contains no files then you be able to stick something together based on whether find test -type f returns anything.

find is a great utility, and RTFM early and often to really understand how much it can do :-)

Answer 3

The following command returns 1 if a directory is empty (or does not exists) and 0 otherwise (so it is possible to invert the return code with ! in a shell script):

find $dir -type d -prune -empty -exec false {} +

Answer 4

a simple approach would be,

$ [ "$(ls -A /path/to/direcory)" ] && echo "not empty" || echo "its empty"

also,

if [ "$(ls -A /path/to/direcory)" ]; then
   echo "its not empty"
else 
   echo "empty directory"

Answer 5

Check whether find <dir> -type f outputs anything. Here's an example:

for dir in A B C; do
    [ -z "`find $dir -type f`" ] && echo "$dir is empty"
done

Answer 6

You can use the following command:

find . -type d -empty