Locate Empty Directories from Command Line

By  on  

As a software engineer that lives too much of his life on a computer, I like keeping my machine as clean as possible. I don't keep rogue downloaded files and removes apps when I don't need them. Part of keeping a clean, performant system is removing empty directories.

To identify empty directories, I use the following command:

find . -type d --empty

To remove empty directories, we can add a --delete flag:

find . -type d --empty --delete

Keeping a clean machine is easy when you know the tools that can help you. find makes identifying and eliminating easy, so don't be afraid to use it!

Recent Features

  • By
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

  • By
    6 Things You Didn’t Know About Firefox OS

    Firefox OS is all over the tech news and for good reason:  Mozilla's finally given web developers the platform that they need to create apps the way they've been creating them for years -- with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.  Firefox OS has been rapidly improving...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Multiple File Upload Input

    More often than not, I find myself wanting to upload more than one file at a time.  Having to use multiple "file" INPUT elements is annoying, slow, and inefficient.  And if I hate them, I can't imagine how annoyed my users would be.  Luckily Safari, Chrome...

  • By
    Xbox Live Gamer API

    My sharpshooter status aside, I've always been surprised upset that Microsoft has never provided an API for the vast amount of information about users, the games they play, and statistics within the games. Namely, I'd like to publicly shame every n00b I've baptized with my...

Discussion

  1. Jim L

    A minor change as it should have a single ‘-‘ on the empty predicate:

    find . -type d -empty

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