Remove files of 0 bytes in size via command line?

Question

So, I got a directory filled with other directories, and I was wondering if it was possible to remove files that have no size. Typically these files are 0 bytes and since I want to merge all these subdirs I could replace a perfectly legit file with a weightless 0 byte file, and there goes my legit file. Any way to remove the zero byte files?

Answer 1

Use the Find command to find files by size and print file names to standard output.

find . -type f -size 0b -print

substitute -print with -delete to delete the files rather than print them on screen.

find . -type f -size 0b -delete

Answer 2

Find and remove all files with a size of 0 recursively:

find . -type f -size 0 -print0 | xargs -I{} -0 rm {}

Example:

% ls -og   
total 4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 0 Jun  7 20:31 bar
-rw-rw-r-- 1 5 Jun  7 20:29 foo

% find . -size 0 -print0 | xargs -I{} -0 rm {}

% ls -og                                      
total 4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 5 Jun  7 20:29 foo

Answer 3

You can also do it directly in the shell. This could be useful if you don't want to delete empty hidden files (those whose name begins with a .). While you could do that with find as well, an alternative would be to use the shell itself:

shopt -s globstar
for file in **/*; do [ ! -s "$file" ] && [ -f "$file" ] && rm "$file"; done

Explanation

• shopt -s globstar : turns on the globstar option for bash which makes ** match one or more subdirectories. **/* will match all files and directories in the current directory and all its subdirectories.
• for file in **/*; do ...; done : iterate over all files and directories found;
• [ ! -s "$file" ] : [ -s "$file" ] is true if the file exists and is not empty. Therefore, [ ! -s "$file" ] (the ! inverses the test) is true if the file doesn't exist or if it is empty.
• [ -f "$file" ] : true if the file is a regular file. Not a directory or a device file or a symlink etc.
• rm "$file" : delete the file.

The && ensure that the next command is only run if the previous one was successful so this will only delete empty, regular files.

Answer 4

Although most answer above is correct, take a look for this command:

A 0 byte sized file means an empty file

though you can run this command:

find . -type f -empty -delete

this will delete all empty files.

You can take a look for those files before delete:

find . -type f -empty