Say I have a directory named foo/. This folder includes subdirectories. How can I delete all the empty directories in one command?

0

5 Answers

Try this command:

find . -empty -type d -delete

The find command is used to search for files/directories matching a particular search criteria from the specified path, in this case the current directory (hence the .).

The -empty option holds true for any file and directory that is empty.

The -type d option holds true for the file type specified; in this case d stands for the file type directory.

The -delete option is the action to perform, and holds true for all files found in the search.

8

You can take advantage of the rmdir command's refusal to delete non-empty directories, and the find -depth option to traverse the directory tree bottom-up:

find . -depth -exec rmdir {} \; 

(and ignore the errors), or append 2>/dev/null to really ignore them.

The -depth option to find starts finding at the bottom of the directory tree.

rm -rf will delete all the files in the directory (and its subdirectories, and ....) AND all the directories and everything.

rmdir *

Will delete all empty directories. It'll throw up an error for every non-empty directory and file, to stop those errors from cluttering your terminal, use

rmdir * 2> /dev/null

5

find . -type d -empty -delete -maxdepth 1

For if you only want to delete the direct subdirectories of foo/.

0

Python approach

$ tree
.
├── empty_dir1
├── empty_dir2
├── subdir1
│   ├── file1.abc
│   └── file2.abc
└── subdir2 ├── file1.abc └── file2.abc
4 directories, 4 files
$ python -c 'import os;empty=[r for r,s,f in os.walk(".") if not f and not s and r != "." ];map(lambda x: os.rmdir(x),empty)'
$ tree
.
├── subdir1
│   ├── file1.abc
│   └── file2.abc
└── subdir2 ├── file1.abc └── file2.abc

This works like so:

• we use os.walk() function to walk recursively the directory tree. On each iteration r is set to current folder that we're accessing,s contains list of directories within r, and f will contain list of files in that folder. Of course if f and s are empty, we know that r is empty.
• first list-comprehension allows us to create empty , the list of all directories that are empty, based on the evaluation stated above.
• second function, map() is used to perform os.rmdir() on each item in empty list. List comprehension could be used as well as alternative.

As a script this would be as so:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
empty=[]
for r,s,f in os.walk("."): if not f and not s and r != ".": empty.append(r)
for i in empty: os.rmdir(i)

2

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