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 directory is empty otherwise it's not empty.
How can I test this?
For example:
A>A1(file1),A2 this is not empty beacuse of file1
B>B1(no file) this is empty
C>C1,C2 this is empty
The following will remove all empty directories (those with no children). As it does so depth-first (bottom-up), it will remove directories with only (empty) directories as children. Beware that, in find, the order of arguments matters.
find testdir -depth -type d -empty -delete
Drop -delete to see the files and directories matched, however note that because of -depth, parent dirs that would become empty will not be listed (beware that -depth is implied by -delete in some find implementations). Remove the -type d if you would to also like to delete empty files.
For example:
$ mkdir -p testdir/foo/bar/baz; touch testdir/foo/afile.txt
$ find testdir -printf '%y %p\n' | tee before.txt
d testdir
d testdir/foo
d testdir/foo/bar
d testdir/foo/bar/baz
f testdir/foo/afile.txt
$ find testdir -depth -type d -empty
testdir/foo/bar/baz
$ find testdir -depth -type d -empty -delete
$ find testdir -printf '%y %p\n' | tee after.txt
d testdir
d testdir/foo
f testdir/foo/afile.txt
$ diff -u {before,after}.txt | tail +4
d testdir
d testdir/foo
-d testdir/foo/bar
-d testdir/foo/bar/baz
f testdir/foo/afile.txt
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
This recursive function would seem to do the trick:
# Bash
findempty() {
find ${1:-.} -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read -r dir
do
if [[ -z "$(find "$dir" -mindepth 1 -type f)" ]] >/dev/null
then
findempty "$dir"
echo "$dir"
fi
done
}
Given this example directory structure:
.
|-- dir1/
|-- dir2/
| `-- dirB/
|-- dir3/
| `-- dirC/
| `-- file5
|-- dir4/
| |-- dirD/
| `-- file4
`-- dir5/
`-- dirE/
`-- dir_V/
The result of running that function would be:
./dir1
./dir5/dirE/dir_V
./dir5/dirE
./dir5
./dir2/dirB
./dir2
which misses /dir4/dirD. If you move the recursive call findempty "$dir" after the fi, the function will include that directory in its results.
find . -name -type d -ls |awk '($2==0){print $11}'