Comments on: How to Find and Delete Empty Directories in Linux

By: Santiago Arraga

Santiago Arraga — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 11:37:01 +0000

It's more efficient to end the exec command with '+' instead of ';', as only one rm will be executed with the list of dirs as argument, instead of individual rms per dir. Also, you can use xargs like this:

# find . -type d -empty -print0 | xargs -0 rmdir

Note the use of -print0 and -0, to manage directories with whitespace in them.

By: Camikazi

Camikazi — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 21:23:39 +0000

Thank you very much, this was exactly what I needed to clean out my music library.

By: Ravi Saive

Ravi Saive — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 04:28:51 +0000

In reply to Roland.

@Roland,

Thanks for pointing out, corrected the command in the article…

By: Roland

Roland — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 12:00:43 +0000

In reply to TaZeR. The final command (with -delete) should not contain the -exec option.

By: Ravi Saive

Ravi Saive — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 06:04:47 +0000

In reply to TaZeR. @TaZeR, A -exec command must be end with a ; (so you generally need to type \; or ';' to avoid interpretion by the Linux shell).

By: TaZeR

TaZeR — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 05:42:03 +0000

Doesn’t work “find: missing argument to `-exec'”

By: Carmine

Carmine — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 11:14:23 +0000

Very helpful article. Thank you.