RFE: find <path> -d -size 0 => doesn't find empty directories

Mark Geisert mark@maxrnd.com
Thu Nov 1 04:40:00 GMT 2018


Correcting my earlier post...

Mark Geisert wrote:
> L A Walsh wrote:
>> Something I can use on my /tmp files on linux is a find command:
>>
>> find /tmp -size 0 -delete
>>
>> to delete zero-len-files or empty-directories in /tmp.
>>
>> Unfortunately, due to directories really not being in the user
>> disk data space, but in the MFT(zone) (I think), the size
>> comes back as zero ('0') for directories.
>>
>> Would it be possible (if not problematic) for the cygwin
>> emulation layer to return some non-zero value if the
>> directory has actual entries in it (ignoring structural
>> values like "." and "..")?  Maybe return as 'size' either
>> a dummy number proportional to #entries (like 10*#entries),
>> or something like summing up actual number (+1) of characters
>> in the file list?
>>
>> Would that be difficult to do, or add?
>
> Try 'find -d -empty'

I shouldn't have blindly trusted the Subject:.  My point was to use find's 
'-empty' option to identify empty objects.  So...
     find . -type d -empty     to find empty directories under '.'
     find . -type f -empty     to find empty files under '.'
     find . -empty             to find empty directories or files under '.'

None of this is Cygwin-specific, by the way.  'man find' was my friend.
Cheers,

..mark


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