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Full Discussion: Removing empty folders using 'find'
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Removing empty folders using 'find' Post 302187354 by era on Monday 21st of April 2008 02:24:03 AM
Old 04-21-2008
Maybe it would be better to start a new thread for this question, but anyway, here goes.

1. Search for any directory

2. If directory contains any non-dot files, skip it (= mark for keeping).

3. Otherwise, print it.

Code:
find -type d -print |
while read dir; do
  keep=false
  for file in "$dir"/*; do
    case $file in
      "$dir"/.*) continue;;  # redundant?  see below
      # "$dir"/\*) continue;;  # maybe need this too, depend on globbing settings
      *) keep=true; break;;
    esac
  done
  if ! $keep; then
    echo "$dir"
  fi
done

Maybe radoulov can come up with an elegant one-liner for this; it's not particularly succinct.

This just echoes the directories; if it seems to work for you, you can change the echo to rm -rf

If your shell doesn't expand non-matching wildcards to an empty string, you might need the case which I commented out, too. (Actually maybe the .* case is redundant; wildcards don't expand dotfiles in bash at least.)
Last edited by era; 04-21-2008 at 03:31 AM.. Reason: empty-glob observation
 

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LEARN ABOUT OPENSOLARIS

gvfs-monitor-dir

gvfs-monitor-dir(1)						   User Commands					       gvfs-monitor-dir(1)

NAME

       gvfs-monitor-dir - monitor the change of a directory content using the VFS system

SYNOPSIS

       gvfs-monitor-dir URI

DESCRIPTION

       gvfs-monitor-dir  monitors  the change content of a directory using the VFS system. If anything changes inside the directory, gvfs-monitor-
       dir will print a message informing of the event.

OPERANDS

       The following operands are supported:

       URI	Specifies the directory location in standard URI format.

EXAMPLES

       Example 1: Monitor a local directory

       example% gvfs-monitor-dir file:///tmp/example

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

       See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables: NLSPATH.

EXIT STATUS

       The exit value 0 is returned regardless of success or failure.

FILES

       The following files are used by this application:

       /usr/bin/gvfs-monitor-dir       Executable to monitor the change content of a directory using the VFS system.

ATTRIBUTES

       See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |      ATTRIBUTE TYPE	     |	    ATTRIBUTE VALUE	   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Availability		     |SUNWgnome-gvfs		   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Interface stability	     |Volatile			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+

SEE ALSO

       gvfs-copy(1), gvfs-info(1), gvfs-less(1), gvfs-ls(1), gvfs-mkdir(1) gvfs-cat(1), gvfs-monitor-file(1), gvfs-mount(1),  gvfs-move(1),  gvfs-
       rename(1), gvfs-open(1), gvfs-rm(1), gvfs-save(1), gvfs-trash(1), gvfs-tree(1), attributes(5), environ(5)

NOTES

       Written by Alvaro Lopez Ortega, Sun Microsystems Inc., 2008.

SunOS 5.11							    25 Mar 2008 					       gvfs-monitor-dir(1)
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