Delete empty directories using 'ls' command

Question

I want to delete empty directories without using find command find . -empty -type d -delete. like the following:

if [ "$(ls -d *)" ]; then
   echo "Not Empty"
else
   echo "Delete"
fi

How do I delete empty directories only using ls?

(assuming bash) If you want to traverse an entire directory without find and do something with those files, you should either use globstar (bash 4+) or recursion. And since I don't think you can make globstar run in DFS order, you would pretty much be limited to recursion. — user60101, Sep 14, 2014 at 22:33
Here are several methods that you could use: stackoverflow.com/questions/2154166/…. You'd need to modify the body of these loops to do the actual deletions. — slm, Sep 15, 2014 at 1:21

evilsoup · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-15 00:44:25Z

5

rmdir will delete empty folders (while leaving other folders alone), so you can use something like:

rmdir */

Or, if you're using bash 4+ and you want recursiveness (other shells have other names for the same thing):

shopt -s globstar
rmdir **/

This will give you a lot of error messages, however (one for every non-empty folder).

answered Sep 15, 2014 at 0:44

evilsoup

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Thanks! Then how would I list the empty directories with ls?
– EPSILONsdfsdfdsf
Sep 15, 2014 at 2:02
And how would I delete recursively>
– EPSILONsdfsdfdsf
Sep 15, 2014 at 2:05
1

+1, but still a couple of problems with globstar. It doesn't traverse dfs, so if you /foo/foo1/foo2, and none of the dirs contain anything else, it will delete foo2, but fail for the others. rmdir **/ is also rather likely to hit ARG_MAX and fail for a tree of reasonable size. Also may want to turn dotglob on if you want hidden directories.
– user60101
Sep 15, 2014 at 3:19

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