How to check if a file is empty in Bash?
[ -s file.name ] || echo "file is empty"
Misspellings are irritating, aren't they? Check your spelling of empty
, but then also try this:
#!/bin/bash -e
if [ -s diff.txt ]; then
# The file is not-empty.
rm -f empty.txt
touch full.txt
else
# The file is empty.
rm -f full.txt
touch empty.txt
fi
I like shell scripting a lot, but one disadvantage of it is that the shell cannot help you when you misspell, whereas a compiler like your C++ compiler can help you.
Notice incidentally that I have swapped the roles of empty.txt
and full.txt
, as @Matthias suggests.
[ -s file ] # Checks if file has size greater than 0
[ -s diff.txt ] && echo "file has something" || echo "file is empty"
If needed, this checks all the *.txt files in the current directory; and reports all the empty file:
for file in *.txt; do if [ ! -s $file ]; then echo $file; fi; done