Find Empty Files and Directories from Command Line

By  on  

If you are anything like me, you like to keep your projects as tight as possible.  By "tight" I mean no lingering, useless files or directories, because bloat is an incredible annoyance and distraction.  And we don't want distractions, do we?

There's a really easy way to find empty files and directories from the command line:

find /path/to/source/directory -empty

The result will be a list of empty files or directories which you can gloriously remove from your project and relax knowing you're running an incredibly tight ship.

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    New MooTools Plugin:  ElementFilter

    My new MooTools plugin, ElementFilter, provides a great way for you to allow users to search through the text of any mix of elements. Simply provide a text input box and ElementFilter does the rest of the work. The XHTML I've used a list for this example...

  • By
    MooTools, mediaboxAdvanced, and Mexico

    The lightbox is probably one of my favorite parts of the Web 2.0 revolution. No more having to open new windows (which can bog down your computer quite a bit) to see a larger image, video, etc. Instead, the item loads right into the...

Discussion

  1. Is this the Mac version of the command? The windows version seems to be in a different order. Plus, I can’t seem to find a setting for the empty folders on Windows. If know, could you share? Thanks.

  2. Arpen

    This command results in f:\>find /path/to/source/directory -empty
    FIND: Invalid switch’ using the command line. Does anyone have a better way to find empty folders using CMD line or Powershell?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!