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
    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...

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Upload Photos to Flickr with PHP

    I have a bit of an obsession with uploading photos to different services thanks to Instagram. Instagram's iPhone app allows me to take photos and quickly filter them; once photo tinkering is complete, I can upload the photo to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and...

  • By
    CSS Vertical Center with Flexbox

    I'm 31 years old and feel like I've been in the web development game for centuries.  We knew forever that layouts in CSS were a nightmare and we all considered flexbox our savior.  Whether it turns out that way remains to be seen but flexbox does easily...

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!