Linux / Unix: Find and Delete All Empty Directories / Files

How do I find out all empty files and directories under Linux / Apple OS X / BSD / Unix like operating systems and delete them in a single pass?

You need to use the combination of find and rm command.

GNU/find has an option to delete files with -delete option. Please note that Unix / Linux filenames can contain blanks and newlines, this default behaviour is often problematic; filenames containing blanks and/or newlines are incorrectly processed by many utilities including rm command. To avoid problems you need to pass the -print0 option to find command and pass the -0 option to xargs command, which prevents such problems.

Method # 1: Find and delete everything with find command only

The syntax is as follows to find and delete all empty directories:

 
find /path/to/dir -empty -type d -delete
 

Find and delete all empty files:

 
find /path/to/dir -empty -type f -delete
 

Where,

• -empty : Only find empty files and make sure it is a regular file or a directory.
• -type d : Only match directories.
• -type f : Only match files.
• -delete : Delete files. Always put -delete option at the end of find command as find command line is evaluated as an expression, so putting -delete first will make find try to delete everything below the starting points you specified.

Method # 2: Find and delete everything using xargs and rm/rmdir command

The syntax is as follows to find and delete all empty directories:

 
## secure and fast version ###
find /path/to/dir/ -type d -empty -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} /bin/rmdir "{}"
 

OR

## secure but may be slow due to -exec  ##
find /path/to/dir -type d -empty -print0 -exec rmdir -v "{}" \;

The syntax is as follows to delete all empty files:

 
## secure and fast version ###
find /path/to/dir/ -type f -empty -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} /bin/rm "{}"
 

OR

 
## secure but may be slow due to -exec  ##
find . -type f -empty -print0 -exec rm -v "{}" \;
 

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