News Group Posts

remove empty directories

Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc
From: Jean-Pierre Radley <jpr@jpr.com>
Subject: Re: Deleting empty directories
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 16:20:32 GMT
Message-ID: <20010919122032.H26027@jpradley.jpr.com> 
References: <001001c1411d$602cf2a0$6700000a@venmar.com> 
Mail-Followup-To: "ScoMisc [c.u.s.m]" <scomsc@xenitec.on.ca>

Fabio Giannotti propounded (on Wed, Sep 19, 2001 at 03:11:35PM +0000):
| 
| Using SCO 5.x (usally 5.0.5 or better) is there a way to quickly find and
| delete all empty directories within a certain directory.  (By quickly I mean
| using the least amount of resoruces.)

        #!/bin/sh
        # rmemptydir:  given one argument, a starting directory,
        # this will delete its empty subdirectories
        find $1 -type d |
        while read D
        do
                l $D | grep -q 'total 0' && rmdir $D
        done

However, this if you have ./a/b/c, where c is a directory, and b has
nothing but c in it, this will still leave you with /a/b until you run
the script again.  It's thus useful to read the output of find in the
reverse direction. 

Thanks, Fabio, because now I've found my first practical use for 'tac':

        #!/bin/sh
        # rmemptydir:  given one argument, a starting directory,
        # this will delete its empty subdirectories

        find $1 -type d | tac |
        while read D
        do
                l $D | grep -q 'total 0' && rmdir $D
        done


'Tac' is not hard to find:

   TAC(1)             GNU textutils 2.0 (August 1999)        (printed 8/6/00)

   NAME
         tac - concatenate and print files in reverse

If you can't compile tac, then awk can be made to print its input lines
in reverse order.

-- 
JP
 

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