Bash Script test for empty dir

uopjohnson · 10-07-2005, 05:14 PM

I'm sure this has been answered, but I'll be damned if I can find it... anyway....

My questions: What I'm looking for is a quick way to tell if a dir has files in it or if it is empty.

A long winded version of the same: I'm writing a bash script which will do some stuff to all of the files in a folder. However I would like to start by looking to see if there are any files in the folder first. The problem is I have no prior knowledge of how they will be named. I can do something like test -e /dir/* but the issue with this is that I will sometimes encounter a dir with thousands of files in which case I get an error, along with the unnecessary overhead of checking to see if everyone on of those files exists. Is there an easy way to check this?

nixcraft · 10-07-2005, 05:56 PM

Well here they have tons of script http://groups.google.com/group/comp....5cf99ad2fdc1c8

homey · 10-07-2005, 06:11 PM

Find has a test for empty called ( -empty )
I haven't played with it much but I noticed a problem. Even an "empty" folder has . and ..
so the following gives me nothing

Code:

find /home/fred -type d -empty -exec ls {} \;

Code:

This command seems to work a little better....
find /home/fred -empty -exec ls {} \;

Tinkster · 10-07-2005, 06:45 PM

A somewhat crude way ...

Code:

if [[ `du -bs $dir|cut -f1` -eq 48 ]]; then echo "$dir empty"; fi

Cheers,
Tink