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Paradiesstaub
Asked: 2011-11-08 17:26:42 +0800 CST

How to find small non-empty folders?

  • 772

I would like to find (later delete) all music folders that are nearly empty (Banshee deletes only the music files but not the other files in there).

I tried with:

find -type d -size -500k \;

But it shows folders that contain bigger files too.

find -type d -size -500k -exec du {} \;

shows the correct size.

How to modify the find cmd to only show folders that are smaller then N?

command-line

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    One command I use, as long as you don't need to pipe this straight into another script, is

    du . | sort -rn

    This would put the smallest folders at the bottom of the printed list along with their sizes. It would take a bit more work to filter out the ones that are larger.

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  2. If you simply want to delete folders which contain under N bytes, the following one liner will work:

    du | awk '$1 <= 500 { print "rm -rf \"" substr($0, length($1)+2) "\""}' | sh

    What does this do? Consecutively:

    • du prints sizes of directories along with their paths
    • $1 <= 500 is a condition that tests if the first column is under 500 (if it's smaller than 500 bytes)
    • print in awk prints rm -rf "/path/to/small/dir"
    • | sh pipes it into sh so it can be executed

    You could also do it using xargs instead of piping it into sh, but I'm used to this way.

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