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

  • By
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

  • By
    Create a Sheen Logo Effect with CSS

    I was inspired when I first saw Addy Osmani's original ShineTime blog post.  The hover sheen effect is simple but awesome.  When I started my blog redesign, I really wanted to use a sheen effect with my logo.  Using two HTML elements and...

Incredible Demos

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!