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Accepted
AndrewR
Asked: 2011-05-18 16:48:02 +0800 CST

How do I delete all empty directories

  • 772

(on a Linux system)

I have a large set of nested subdirectories on a filesystem. I would like to prune all directory paths that contain no files at all.

In other words I would like to delete every directory where there are no files in that directory or in any subdirectory of that directory recursively.

linux unix bash

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    For all versions of find

    find -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \;

    If you have a newer version

     find -type d -empty -delete
    • 15

  2. May not be the best solution, but this script works:

    #!/bin/sh

while true
do
    DIRS=`find . -xdev -type d -exec find {}  -maxdepth 0 -empty  \;`
    if [ -z "$DIRS" ]; then
        exit 0
    else
        echo $DIRS | xargs rmdir
    fi
done

    (based partly on the answer to List all empty folders)

    • 1 
  3. for i in `find -type d -empty`; do rmdir $i; done
    • 0