Bash Shell Check Whether a Directory is Empty or Not

Seems to me that using ls is not required – in fact, it is doable within the shell alone:

set - `echo .* *`
if [ $# = "2" ] ; then
: empty directory
else
: not empty ...
fi

David
UNIX Administratosphere

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Yes. I’d forgotten: when no matches are found (“*”) then the resulting text is the character unchanged. This should work better:

FILES=”`echo .* *`”
if [ $FILES = '. .. *' ] ; then
: empty dir
else
: not empty
fi

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Thanks Scot!

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A slight variation on the original post which does it numerically and includes dot files.

DIR=/home/user
[ $(( $(ls -a1 $DIR | wc -l) >= 3 )) = 0 ] && echo Empty || echo Nope

That’s a one and not an ‘l’ to the ls command. An empty directory only has the two entries – . & ..

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Ok, this works, after hours of coding a simple solution was found to be best loll.What kept giving me trouble was the *, also I had found a solution a long time ago, but it didnt work if you had empty files in the directory.I tried all the IF statement solutions and it wont work in all situations.So best method is below:

#!/bin/bash

DIR=/var/www/tee

for i in $DIR/*
do
if [ -e $i ] && [ $(echo $?) -eq "0 " ]

then
echo The Directory is NOT EMPTY

else

echo The directory is EMPTY

fi
done

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if [ $( stat -c %h . ) -gt 2 ] ; then echo not empty; fi
Solution with “$(ls -A $DIR)” could exceed command buffer size.

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If used in a script, I’d go with a slight modification of the first comment (as the “set” clobbers positional parameters, putting it in a function will clobber only local function parameters, not the global ones!):

shopt -s dotglob nullglob
is_empty_dir() {
  set - "`echo $1/*`"
  test -z "$1"
}

And then calling:

  is_empty_dir 

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I had a seriously nasty time with this.

In a bash script I wanted to:
1. Create and pass a list of directories that match a pattern
2. Use a variable to check if the directories matching the pattern were empty
3. Delete empty directories.

The challenge I ran into was with wildcard expansion in variables. I spent a little while pulling my hair out over ” and ‘ and ` until I figured out (the final solution was pretty simple).

Here is my short script that
1. creates a list of directories within $1 that match a pattern
– in this case the grep returns all directories that are 5 numerical digits
2. verifies whether or not content exists
3. deletes the directory if no content is present

#!/bin/bash
# List Empty Directories that are directories in the
# format ./##### If they are empty, delete them.

ls -d */ > testdir.txt
grep ‘[0-9]\{5\}’ ./testdir.txt > testdir2.txt
rm ./testdir.txt

i=1

while [ $i -le `wc -l ./testdir2.txt | gawk '{print $1}'` ]; do
line=`head -$i ./testdir2.txt | tail -1`
correctdirname=”./”$line
echo -n “Dir “$i” “$correctdirname

files=`echo $correctdirname $correctdirname*`
test=$correctdirname” “$correctdirname”*”
if [ "$files" == "$test" ]
then echo ” empty” #; rm -rf $correctdirname
else echo ” files found”
fi

i=`expr $i + 1`

done

For safety I commented out the delete/rm. Anyone trying this should test carefully before running this script and use a test directory with test data. The delete command will delete entire directories whether they are empty or not! Verify your scenario, verify the variables match your scenario, and double-check before uncommenting that rm command.

I hope someone finds this useful.

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After having solved the logic problem I was overly-focused on I was playing around with additional information from the above posts and changed my if statment based upon the one provided by nixcraft, above:
My if original: if [ "$files" == "$test" ]
Nixcraft’s if: if [ "$(ls -A $DIR)" ]
My new if: if [ ! "$(ls -A $line)" ]

Using the if provided by Nixcraft I came up with an if that works in place of the if statement in my above script and is a little cleaner because it does not require creation of the $test variable. I put a ! in front of it so I could easily swap if statements. Alternately you could reverse the then-else.

Here is the updated script with the old vars and if commented out:

#!/bin/bash
# List Empty Directories that are directories in the
# format ./##### If they are empty, delete them.

ls -d */ > testdir.txt
grep ‘[0-9]\{5\}’ ./testdir.txt > testdir2.txt
rm ./testdir.txt

i=1

while [ $i -le `wc -l ./testdir2.txt | gawk '{print $1}'` ]; do
line=`head -$i ./testdir2.txt | tail -1`
correctdirname=”./”$line
echo -n “Dir “$i” “$correctdirname

# files=`echo $correctdirname $correctdirname*`
# test=$correctdirname” “$correctdirname”*”
# if [ "$files" == "$test" ]
if [ ! "$(ls -A $line)" ]
then echo ” empty” #; rm -rf $correctdirname
else echo ” files found”
fi

i=`expr $i + 1`

done

rm ./testdir2.txt

Note I added the final line to remove the 2nd test/data file.

Also you should be able to comment out the if and uncomment the 3 lines above it to switch back and forth between the two options.

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