Delete Empty Folders - recursive

Question

I would like to clean up some folders. So I want to delete all folders which are empty or only contain other folders...

First I tried

find . -type d -delete

but this lists the subfolders after the parents, so I would have to execute it multiple times.

So I tried using tac and pipes

find . -type d | tac | xargs rmdir

This one fails on whitespaces, etc, so I need a masking - now I am stuck...

Possible duplicate: How to remove all empty directories in a subtree? — Marco, Nov 06 '15 at 10:37
Nope. I want also to remove non-empty folder, which contain only folders! — Jaster, Nov 06 '15 at 11:04
multiple times? how often?... thats why I want to do it recursive — Jaster, Nov 06 '15 at 11:09
At least in GNU 'find', the -delete action also implies -depth i.e. directories containing only other directories become empty as the command executes from the bottom of the tree up. — steeldriver, Nov 06 '15 at 11:10
@steeldriver Why should someone use vendor specific extensions when the task can be done using only standard compliant features? — schily, Nov 06 '15 at 11:33

schily · Answer 1 · 2015-11-06T11:55:09.427

1

find . -type d -depth -exec rmdir {} +

should work if you have a halfway recent find(1) - note that execplus was added in 1989 ;-)

Note that there was a hint that there may be non-standard find implementations that emit a warning when -depth was not specified as the first primary.

edited Nov 06 '15 at 11:55

answered Nov 06 '15 at 11:29

schily

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Delete Empty Folders - recursive

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