til/unix/delete-empty-files-with-find.md

Delete Empty Files With Find

I was discussing a command with a colleague for finding and deleting empty files from a given directory. This command involved a series of pipes and I probably wouldn't have solved it too differently. I was curious what other ways there were of doing such a task, so I asked Claude. The first option it came back with taught me about two new-to-me flags that find supports.

First is the -empty flag which applies a filter on the results to files or directories that are empty.

Second is the -delete flag which will delete found files and directories.

Those two can be combined to delete any results that are empty. Then to target just files, I can include the -type f flag. And if I want to prevent it from recursing down some unexpected tree of directories, I could also add in -maxdepth 1.

To delete all empty files in specific-directory, I can run the following:

❯ find ./specific-directory -maxdepth 1 -type f -empty -delete

My first thought for a command like this is that I will need to xargs rm, so it's neat to know about the -delete flag in particular.

See man find for more details.