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
    QuickBoxes for Dojo

    Adding to my mental portfolio is important to me. First came MooTools, then jQuery, and now Dojo. I speak often with Peter Higgins of Dojo fame and decided it was time to step into his world. I chose a simple but useful plugin...

  • By
    Create a Dojo Lightbox with dojox.image.Lightbox

    One of the reasons I love the Dojo Toolkit is that it seems to have everything.  No scouring for a plugin from this site and then another plugin from that site to build my application.  Buried within the expansive dojox namespace of Dojo is

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!