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justingrif
Asked: 2011-10-30 18:44:37 +0800 CST

How do I delete all empty directories in a directory from the command line?

  • 772

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

command-line

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    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.

    • 148

  2. 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.

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  3. 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
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  4. find . -type d -empty -delete -maxdepth 1

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

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  5. 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)
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