How to Delete Empty Files and Directories in UNIX or Linux Host? find Command Example

Deleting empty file and directory in Unix

Hello guys, if you are wondering how to find and remove all empty files and directories from a Linux host then you are at the right place. Earlier, I have shared Linux command to free disk space by removing big files and directories and in this article, I will share find command you can use to remove empty files and directories. Many times we need to find and delete empty files or directories in UNIX/Linux. Since there is no single command in Unix/Linux which allows you to remove empty files or empty directories rather we need to rely on find command and xargs command. 

In this UNIX and Linux example, we will see How to delete empty files and directories. Before removing empty files and directories we need to find those files and there are lots of option available to search for empty directories like find, grep , awk, etc. 

You just need to know the correct option. Like in any other operating system empty files and directories in Unix are those whose size is zero. Empty files don't contain any content while empty directories do not contain anything at all like files or sub-directories.

As discussed in the previous post 10 frequently-used find command examples we can also use find command to search and delete empty files and directories as it provides searching files based on the size as well.

Creating Empty files and directories in Linux/UNIX

let's first create an empty file and directory to demonstrate an example of how to delete empty files in Unix. We can use the same set of commands which we have used in our example of How to find the size of files and directories in Unix.

//This will create an empty file in the current directory

test@localhost:~/unix touch empty.txt          

//This will create an empty directory inside the current directory
test@localhost:~/unix mkdir empty_dir    

//This the command will find all empty files and directories in Unix
test@localhost:~/unix find . -empty          
./empty.txt
./empty_dir

Searching Empty Files and Directory in Unix/Linux

find -empty option prints both empty files and directories. If you just want to print files then use -type f option and -type d for listing empty directories. its quite flexible. You can also use grep command along with ls –lrt to display empty files and directories as shown below :

//this command will print empty files

test@localhost:~/unix find . -type f -empty
./empty.txt

//this command will print empty directories
test@localhost:~/unix find  . -type d -empty
./empty_dir

//How to use grep command to print empty files and directories
test@localhost:~/unix ls -ltr | grep '\<0\>'
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 test Domain Users   0 Jun 15 11:43 empty_dir/
-rw-r--r--  1 test Domain Users   0 Jun 15 11:44 empty.txt

//find command to print empty files and directories
test@localhost:~/unix find . -maxdepth 1  -size 0 -ls
90353467524120775    0 drwxr-xr-x   1 test Domain Users        0 Jun 15 11:43 .
9007199255261921     0 -rw-r--r--   1 test Domain Users        0 Jun 15 11:44 ./empty.txt
19421773393554899    0 drwxr-xr-x   1 test Domain Users        0 Jun 15 11:43 ./empty_dir

Deleting Empty Files and Directories in Unix Linux

Now once we certain that there are empty files and directory exists you can delete them by using find -delete option or executing rm command in combination with find command as shown below:

//removing Empty files and directories using the find command

test@localhost:~/unix find . -empty -delete

test@localhost:~/unix find . -empty -delete

test@localhost:~/unix ls -lrt
total 1.0K
-rw-r--r-- 1 test Domain Users 118 Aug  4  2011 contacts.txt

//using find and xargs command to remove empty files and directories
test@localhost:~/unix find . -empty | xargs rm -r

test@localhost:~/unix find . -empty -type d -exec rm -r {} \;
find: `./empty_dir': Not a directory

And, here is a nice summary of Linux command to remove empty files and directory from any host:

That’s all on How to find and remove empty files and directories in Unix and Linux hosts. As I mentioned there are many ways to find empty files and directories but the best way is by using the find command, which not only lists empty files but empty directories as well.

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