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
    CSS 3D Folding Animation

    Google Plus provides loads of inspiration for front-end developers, especially when it comes to the CSS and JavaScript wonders they create. Last year I duplicated their incredible PhotoStack effect with both MooTools and pure CSS; this time I'm going to duplicate...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    dwImageProtector Plugin for jQuery

    I've always been curious about the jQuery JavaScript library. jQuery has captured the hearts of web designers and developers everywhere and I've always wondered why. I've been told it's easy, which is probably why designers were so quick to adopt it NOT that designers...

  • By
    WebSocket and Socket.IO

    My favorite web technology is quickly becoming the WebSocket API. WebSocket provides a welcomed alternative to the AJAX technologies we've been making use of over the past few years. This new API provides a method to push messages from client to server efficiently...

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!