Recursively delete empty folders with verbose output

Question

This should be fairly simple, but I am not sure what i'm missing.

I'd like to recursively delete empty directories, and get an output for what's being deleted, this command works for sure, but I just can't print the actions of -excec verbosely.

while [ -n "$(find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rm -v -rf {} +)" ]; do :; done

by recursively I mean, I want to keep deleting empty folders, until there's no other empty folder.

$ tree .
.
├── empty
│   └── empty
│       └── empty
└── non-emty
    └── ko

this item will only remove one empty folder in the tree

$ find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir -v {} +
rmdir: removing directory, `./empty/empty'

I worry about the logic of this -- is a directory empty if it only contains directories that are empty? Also -- as far as logging the output -- whenever I do something like this that has the potential to wreck a whole bunch of stuff, I have it output the command it would run but not actually run the command itself. Then, if I actually want to run those commands I can just run the output like a shell script. — chris, Apr 14 '13 at 13:09
you right, i have the wrong verbiage, it's not quite empty. let me change that. it has nothing to do with logic, lol there's a problem, keep deleting empty directories until there are none left. I try to solve. — kmassada, Apr 14 '13 at 13:13

user9517 · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-14T13:13:54.247

You don't need the while loop and you should use rmdir -p to remove the empty parents

find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir -v -p {} + 
rmdir: removing directory, `./1/3'
rmdir: removing directory, `./1'
rmdir: removing directory, `.'
rmdir: failed to remove directory `.': Invalid argument
rmdir: removing directory, `./2/3'
rmdir: removing directory, `./2'
rmdir: failed to remove directory `./2': Directory not empty

The reason you don't see the output with your command is that you are running it in a subshell $(...) but doing nothing with the returned output you could put an echo before the subsell to print out what it returns

echo $(find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir -v -p {} +)
rmdir: removing directory, `./1/3' rmdir: removing directory, `./1' rmdir: removing directory, `.' rmdir: removing directory, `./2/3' rmdir: removing directory, `./2'

**recursively** like This does work on one line, but I want to keep deleting empty folders until there's no true empty folder. — kmassada, Apr 14 '13 at 13:02

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 23 '20 at 09:32

0

With find, on both Linux and MacOS, you have the -delete option. It already implies -depth. And for verbose output, you can add -print. So it's just :

find . -type d -empty -delete -print

answered Oct 23 '20 at 09:32

mivk

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Recursively delete empty folders with verbose output

2 Answers2