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pebox11
Asked: 2019-06-26 11:31:57 +0800 CST

Deleting empty while keeping non empty 4KB files in Ubuntu

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I have a folder that contains hundreds of thousands of small .txt files of size 4kb. Some of them are totally empty while others are not. However, they all show the same size 4kb since this is the minimum block size configured. Is there a way to massively delete the empty ones but keep the non empty? Doing an

rsync --remove-sent-files -rv --min-size=4kb

removes everything.

Thank you

files rsync du

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I think I found a partial answer. If we suppose that a txt file with an empty content has at least one hidden character, then someone can find all files with size under a specific number of bytes and delete these. If for example we would like to delete all files of size 1 byte we can issue:

    find . -type f -size -2c -delete
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  2. The truly empty files will show 0 bytes, when looked at with ls -l.

    You can remove them with find (read man find https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/cosmic/en/man1/find.1.html):

    find folder -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.txt' -size 0 -delete
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