Remove empty files in home directory Post: 303011530

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Remove empty files in home directory Post 303011530 by drysdalk on Friday 19th of January 2018 08:52:57 AM

01-19-2018

Registered User

Hi,

There's no easy way to do what you want to do with find, or at least not based on a simple -type test. As you've previously been advised, an empty file is defined as a file containing 0 lines and whose contents are 0 bytes in length - in other words, a file that is empty. A file that contains anything else is not empty, and no UNIX utility will ever treat it as such.

The problem you have here is that you're not really working with the correct definition of "empty", as far as UNIX itself is concerned. An empty file is one which contains literally and solely nothing whatsoever, and whose size on disk is always zero bytes. If it contains anything else it's not empty, and you'll have to test for whatever else you want to find on a case-by-case basis, being very careful indeed not to match any legitimate files you wouldn't want to remove.

For example, whilst it's easy to search for all files with a line consisting of a single space (e.g. grep -l ^\ $ *), the grep utility operates on a line-by-line basis. So whilst this would indeed return the names of files which had a line consisting of a single space, this wouldn't take into consideration any lines before or after such a matching line which might contain legitimate text. There's no conceptually-easy way to model what you want to find, since by definition the files you're looking at are not actually empty.

The only thing that comes close to what you want would be if you know that the files you regard as "empty" are always no more than one line in length. You could at least return all files that consist of only one single line by doing something like:

Code:

find . -type f -exec /usr/bin/wc -l \{\} \; | awk '$1 <= 1 {print $2}'

This would find all files in or beneath the current working directory, and only print their filename if they consisted of 0 or 1 lines. But again note that this will not be paying any attention to the actual content of those lines - the files in question could consist of one single line of legitimate text, so you'd have to add further tests to check that they only contained whitespace. But this should be enough to get you started, with any luck.

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LEARN ABOUT SUNOS

fgrep

fgrep(1)							   User Commands							  fgrep(1)

NAME

       fgrep - search a file for a fixed-character string

SYNOPSIS

       /usr/bin/fgrep [-bchilnsvx] [-e pattern_list] [-f pattern-file] [pattern] [file...]

       /usr/xpg4/bin/fgrep [-bchilnsvx] [-e pattern_list] [-f pattern-file] [pattern] [file...]

DESCRIPTION

       The  fgrep (fast grep) utility searches files for a character string and prints all lines that contain that string. fgrep is different from
       grep(1) and from egrep(1) because it searches for a string, instead of searching for a pattern that matches an  expression.  fgrep  uses  a
       fast and compact algorithm.

       The characters $, *, [, ^, |, (, ), and  are interpreted literally by fgrep, that is, fgrep does not recognize full regular expressions as
       does egrep. These characters have special meaning to the shell. Therefore, to be safe, enclose the entire string within single quotes (').

       If no files are specified, fgrep assumes standard input. Normally, each line that is found is copied to the standard output. The file  name
       is printed before each line that is found if there is more than one input file.

OPTIONS

       The following options are supported:

       -b	       Precedes  each  line  by the block number on which the line was found. This can be useful in locating block numbers by con-
		       text. The first block is 0.

       -c	       Prints only a count of the lines that contain the pattern.

       -e pattern_list Searches for a string in pattern-list. This is useful when the string begins with a -.

       -f pattern-file Takes the list of patterns from pattern-file.

       -h	       Suppresses printing of files when searching multiple files.

       -i	       Ignores upper/lower case distinction during comparisons.

       -l	       Prints the names of files with matching lines once, separated by new-lines. Does not repeat the names  of  files  when  the
		       pattern is found more than once.

       -n	       Precedes each line by its line number in the file. The first line is 1.

       -s	       Works silently, that is, displays nothing except error messages. This is useful for checking the error status.

       -v	       Prints all lines except those that contain the pattern.

       -x	       Prints only lines that are matched entirely.

OPERANDS

       The following operands are supported:

       file	       Specifies a path name of a file to be searched for the patterns. If no file operands are specified, the standard input will
		       be used.

   /usr/bin/fgrep
       pattern	       Specifies a pattern to be used during the search for input.

   /usr/xpg4/bin/fgrep
       pattern	       Specifies one or more patterns to be used during the search for input. This operand is treated as if it were  specified	as
		       -e pattern_list.

USAGE

       See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of fgrep when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2**31 bytes).

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

       See  environ(5)	for  descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of fgrep: LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE, LC_MES-
       SAGES, and NLSPATH.

EXIT STATUS

       The following exit values are returned:

       0	If any matches are found

       1	If no matches are found

       2	For syntax errors or inaccessible files, even if matches were found.

ATTRIBUTES

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

   /usr/bin/fgrep
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |      ATTRIBUTE TYPE	     |	    ATTRIBUTE VALUE	   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Availability		     |SUNWcsu			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+

   /usr/xpg4/bin/fgrep
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |      ATTRIBUTE TYPE	     |	    ATTRIBUTE VALUE	   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Availability		     |SUNWxcu4			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |CSI			     |Enabled			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+

SEE ALSO

       ed(1), egrep(1), grep(1), sed(1), sh(1), attributes(5), environ(5), largefile(5), XPG4(5)

NOTES

       Ideally, there should be only one grep command, but there is not a single algorithm that spans a wide enough range of space-time tradeoffs.

       Lines are limited only by the size of the available virtual memory.

   /usr/xpg4/bin/fgrep
       The /usr/xpg4/bin/fgrep utility is identical to /usr/xpg4/bin/grep -F (see grep(1)). Portable applications  should  use	/usr/xpg4/bin/grep
       -F.

SunOS 5.10							    4 Oct 2002								  fgrep(1)

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