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Delete empty directories with zsh

Terminal - Delete empty directories with zsh
rm -d **/*(/^F)
2009-08-06 21:41:19
User: claytron
Functions: rm
4
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Delete empty directories with zsh

This command uses the recursive glob and glob qualifiers from zsh. This will remove all the empty directories from the current directory down.

The **/* recurses down through all the files and directories

The glob qualifiers are added into the parenthesis. The / means only directories. The F means 'full' directories, and the ^ reverses that to mean non-full directories. For more info on these qualifiers see the zsh docs: http://zsh.dotsrc.org/Doc/Release/Expansion.html#SEC87

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What others think

Nice, and thanks for actually explaining the syntax and providing the link.

Comment by bwoodacre 201 weeks and 4 days ago

I love zsh, mostly because of the cool stuff like this that you can do with it. But I've found that if you have a large directory tree (i.e. one with thousands of files) find is a lot faster than **/*. With find you can do 'find . -type d -delete' to delete empty directories.

Comment by andrew112358 201 weeks and 4 days ago

Your point of view

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