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
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Save Web Form Content Using Control + S

    We've all used word processing applications like Microsoft Word and if there's one thing they've taught you it's that you need to save every few seconds in anticipation of the inevitable crash. WordPress has mimicked this functionality within their WYSIWYG editor and I use it...

  • By
    Duplicate the jQuery Homepage Tooltips Using MooTools

    The jQuery homepage has a pretty suave tooltip-like effect as seen below: Here's how to accomplish this same effect using MooTools. The XHTML The above XHTML was taken directly from the jQuery homepage -- no changes. The CSS The above CSS has been slightly modified to match the CSS rules already...

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!