Recursively delete empty directories

re: Recursively delete empty directories

Emil Gustafsson — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:10:48 GMT

Good point! I've added double quotes in the original post now.

re: Recursively delete empty directories

Cristian Vidmar — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:03:54 GMT

cellfish, your script saved my day but I suggest putting double quotes around $D otherwise the script will fail on directory names with spaces

re: Recursively delete empty directories

Emil Gustafsson — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 10:28:36 GMT

@cLive:

fair enough but still all the options used are not available on all platforms.

re: Recursively delete empty directories

cLive ;-) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 05:54:31 GMT

@cellfish - no, ZungBang is correct - look up what the "-depth" option does to the recursion order.

re: Recursively delete empty directories

Emil Gustafsson — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:21:34 GMT

@Magnus:

Nice since it does not print any error messages for non empty directories. However it assumes perl is installed which might not always be the case.

Just in case the link disapears, here's the perl command: perl -MFile::Find -e"finddepth(sub{rmdir},'.')"

re: Recursively delete empty directories

Magnus — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:46:31 GMT

Here's a nice Perl one-liner:

http://duramecho.com/ComputerPrograms/DeleteEmptyDirectories/index.html

re: Recursively delete empty directories

Emil Gustafsson — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:48:50 GMT

@ZungBang:

Your example does not know because if I have a structure "A/B" where the folder B is the only content of A your example will only delete B. Also the -empty option is not available on all platforms, for example the standard find on Solaris 8 does not support -empty. Nor does the rmdir on Solaris 8 support "--ignore-fail-on-non-empty" which could be used to supress error messages (instead of piping to /dev/null) from rmdir.

re: Recursively delete empty directories

ZungBang — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:03:15 GMT

find <parent-dir> -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir -v {} \;

re: Recursively delete empty directories

Emil Gustafsson — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 09:49:46 GMT

Actually the "ls | grep" part is some kind of premature optimization (which got in there since it was in the example I looked at). That is why I pipe the output to /dev/null since I don't want to see the messages about directories not being removed since it is non-empty. Consider the structure "a/b/file". The script above will try to remove "a" (since it contains no files) and fails since "b" is still there.

A cleaner solution would have only "rmdir $D 2>/dev/null". All this assumes that you have not changed rmdir to an alias like "rm -rf" ofcouse...

re: Recursively delete empty directories

Raymond Chen - MSFT — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:39:10 GMT

What if the directory is nonempty but contains only hidden files? Should that be an "ls -la" / total 2?