Find empty folders

[glennzo]

How would one go about finding empty folders in a specific path? In other words, I have a music folder, /mnt/sata500/music. In that folder path there are folders that contain albums and music files but there are also various empty folders. I would like to remove those folders but I need to find them first. I realize that I could use Nautilus and find/remove each one by hand but that would take considerable time. I'd like to find them using a command line utility and delete them in a similar fashion.

What I've been doing to find various music files is using find, for example

[glenn@phenom14 sata500>$ find /mnt/sata500/music/ -type f | grep mp3 | wc -l
2018

Can I use this same type of search to find folders that are empty? If so, how then would I remove them? Maybe pipe the find command to a text file and then use the text file as criteria for the rm command?

[Dangermouse]

Hi Glenn

To find

find -type d -empty

and to remove (AT YOUR OWN RISK)

find -type d -empty -delete

ps do you like the new look? (fedoraplus)

[glennzo]

You know what? MC seems the best way to go.

Carry on .....


Thanks Dangermouse.

Yes, the new look is a tremendous improvement.

[smr54]

find whatever |xargs rm -rf

xargs is a nice handy tool--it takes the result of what you're doing and uses that as the argument to the next command.

yum search font |grep -i japanese |awk '{print $1}' |xargs yum -y install

(If you knew all that, sorry).

To find empty directories it's surprisingly straightforward

find /mnt/sata500/music/ -type d -empty


So

find /mnt/sata500/music -type d -empty |xargs rmdir

This is pretty safe, because if the directory wasn't really empty, it won't work with rmdir, you'd have to use rm -rf.

One thing I like to do though, to avoid surprises, is to use echo first.

find /mnt/sata500/music -type d -empty |xargs echo rmdir

Which shows you what it would do.

[kurtdriver]

This just worked on a test directory on F13.

ls -R |rmdir test/*

Seems odd that rmdir doesn't have an option for recursive.

[forkbomb]

Originally Posted by kurtdriver

This just worked on a test directory on F13.

ls -R |rmdir test/*

Seems odd that rmdir doesn't have an option for recursive.

That's what rm -rf is for.

[kurtdriver]

Originally Posted by forkbomb

That's what rm -rf is for.

Now that's a head slapper.

[banji]

Please make sure that you use xargs whenever you need to execute a command on find's results. Also make sure that you display the results before deleting.