How do I delete all empty directories in a directory from the command line?
Try this command:
find . -empty -type d -delete
The find
command is used to search for files/directories matching a particular search criteria from the specified path, in this case the current directory (hence the .
).
The -empty
option holds true for any file and directory that is empty.
The -type d
option holds true for the file type specified; in this case d
stands for the file type directory.
The -delete
option is the action to perform, and holds true for all files found in the search.
You can take advantage of the rmdir
command's refusal to delete non-empty directories, and the find -depth
option to traverse the directory tree bottom-up:
find . -depth -exec rmdir {} \;
(and ignore the errors), or append 2>/dev/null
to really ignore them.
The -depth
option to find
starts finding at the bottom of the directory tree.
rm -rf
will delete all the files in the directory (and its subdirectories, and ....) AND all the directories and everything.
rmdir *
Will delete all empty directories. It'll throw up an error for every non-empty directory and file, to stop those errors from cluttering your terminal, use
rmdir * 2> /dev/null