How to find small non-empty folders?

Question

I would like to find (later delete) all music folders that are nearly empty (Banshee deletes only the music files but not the other files in there).

I tried with:

find -type d -size -500k \;

But it shows folders that contain bigger files too.

find -type d -size -500k -exec du {} \;

shows the correct size.

How to modify the find cmd to only show folders that are smaller then N?

Answer 1

One command I use, as long as you don't need to pipe this straight into another script, is

du . | sort -rn

This would put the smallest folders at the bottom of the printed list along with their sizes. It would take a bit more work to filter out the ones that are larger.

Answer 2

If you simply want to delete folders which contain under N bytes, the following one liner will work:

du | awk '$1 <= 500 { print "rm -rf \"" substr($0, length($1)+2) "\""}' | sh

What does this do? Consecutively:

• du prints sizes of directories along with their paths
• $1 <= 500 is a condition that tests if the first column is under 500 (if it's smaller than 500 bytes)
• print in awk prints rm -rf "/path/to/small/dir"
• | sh pipes it into sh so it can be executed

You could also do it using xargs instead of piping it into sh, but I'm used to this way.