finding empty directories unix

Question

i need to find empty directories for given list of directories some directories have directories inside it

if inside directories 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

thanks

Answer 1

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 2

Hi. Use code below

find . -type d -empty

Answer 3

I created a simple structure as follows:

test/
test/test2/
test/test2/test2.2/
test/test3/
test/test3/file

The test/test3/file contains some junk text.

Issuing find test -empty returns "test/test2/test2.2" as the only empty directory.

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

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.

find test -depth -empty -delete

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

If your definition of an empty directory tree is that it does't contain any files then you be able to stick something together based on whether find test -type f return anything.

Find is a great utility, but you need to read the man page to really understand how much it can do :-)

Answer 6

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.

Answer 7

find . -name -type d -ls |awk '($2==0){print $11}'