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Possible Duplicate:
How to remove all empty directories in a subtree?
I create directories very often, scattered over my home directory, and I find it very hard to locate and delete them.
I want any alias/function/script to find/locate and delete all empty directories in my home directory.
The find command is the primary tool for recursive file system operations.
Use the -type d expression to tell find you're interested in finding directories only (and not plain files). The GNU version of find supports the -empty test, so
$ find . -type d -empty -print
will print all empty directories below your current directory.
Use find ~ -… or find "$HOME" -… to base the search on your home directory (if it isn't your current directory).
After you've verified that this is selecting the correct directories, use -delete to delete all matches:
$ find . -type d -empty -delete
-empty.
home directory if I run it form ~/Desktop.
Aug 25, 2012 at 21:58
~$ in the beginning). If you want to run it regardless of your working directory, use "$HOME" instead of . as jordanm suggested in his answer.
. instead of ~. If somebody copy-pastes this without noticing and only checks the output of the first this can have bad consequences.
Jun 3, 2016 at 1:28
-mindepth 1 here, to prevent from deleting the starting directory itself, if it would be empty. It's not really probable case for $HOME but if you would use this on any other directory..
Aug 20, 2016 at 12:46
You can call rmdir on every directory, since rmdir will only delete a directory if it is empty:
find "$HOME" -type d -exec rmdir {} + 2>/dev/null
If you also want to print the directories being removed, you will need to check if they are empty:
find "$HOME" -type d -exec bash -c 'shopt -s nullglob; shopt -s dotglob; files=("$1"/*); [[ ${files[@]} ]] || rmdir -v "$1"' -- {} \;
Here is a pure bash example (version 4 or higher):
shopt -s globstar
for dir in **/; do
files=("$dir"/*)
[[ ${files[@]} ]] || rmdir -v "$dir"
done
rmdir -v to echo.
find doesn't have -empty, so the -exec trick is helpful. But rather than sending errors off to /dev/null, it's better to tell rmdir to suppress them, e.g. find . -type d -depth -exec rmdir -p --ignore-fail-on-non-empty {} \;
Apr 1, 2015 at 19:19
find ... | xargs -n 100 rmdir to delete them in batches. Even then, it won't work properly because it will fail to remove early directories that will later become empty because of later empty directories' removal. Thus you'd need to execute it several times.
rmdir once. That's the difference between using + and \; for terminating a command in find.
WORK=$(mktemp -d)orcd $(mktemp -d). Of course don't put important files that you need to preserve in those directories. But most likely your system is already setup to automagically make those files disappear after a while./z/directory on start-up and do all my temporary work there.