Cfrtjryk

we create the following command in order to remove only the empty folders that older then 100min

find /tmp -type  d -empty -mmin +100 -printf '%p was deleted!!n' -delete

because we intend to run it from cron job on production machines

we want to understand if empty flag will also ignore folders with links or empty files

or in other words how empty flag check the folder ?

Empty means empty. If there is any sort of file in a directory, then the directory isn't empty. To illustrate:

$ mkdir dir{1..8}; 

  ln -s /etc/ dir1/workingLink; 

  ln -s noSuchFile dir2/brokenLink;  

  mkfifo dir3/fifo; 

  touch dir4/emptyFile; 

  echo foo > dir5/nonEmptyFile; 

  touch dir6/.hiddenFile; 

  mkdir dir7/subdir

$ tree -a

.

├── dir1

│   └── workingLink -> /etc/

├── dir2

│   └── brokenLink -> noSuchFile

├── dir3

│   └── fifo

├── dir4

│   └── emptyFile

├── dir5

│   └── nonEmptyFile

├── dir6

│   └── .hiddenFile

├── dir7

│   └── subdir

└── dir8

So, we have a directory with a working symlink, one with a broken link (pointing to a non-existant file), one with a FiFo (a named pipe), one with an empty file, one with a file that isn't empty, one with a hidden file, one with a subdirectory and only one that's empty. Which one will be deleted?

$ find . -type d -empty -printf '%p WAS DELETED!n' -delete 

                        -or -printf '%p: not empty!n'

./dir8 WAS DELETED!

./dir3/fifo: not empty!

./dir3: not empty!

./dir5/nonEmptyFile: not empty!

./dir5: not empty!

./dir6/.hiddenFile: not empty!

./dir6: not empty!

./dir2/brokenLink: not empty!

./dir2: not empty!

./dir4/emptyFile: not empty!

./dir4: not empty!

./dir7/subdir WAS DELETED!

./dir7 WAS DELETED!

./dir1/workingLink: not empty!

./dir1: not empty!

.: not empty!

So, three things were deleted:

1. The empty directory dir8.


2. The empty (sub) directory dir7/subdir
   


3. The (now) empty directory dir7. This was deleted because find first deleted dir7/subdir and then dir7 was empty so that was deleted as well.

So, any type of content in a directory will stop it from being deleted by this command, but you need to be careful in case the only thing in a directory is other, empty, directories. In that case, the find command will also delete the parent directory since it will be empty by the time it finishes.

If you don't want to remove subdirectories which might cause a parent to be removed, with GNU find (the default on Linux) you can use the -maxdepth flag to limit find to only the current directory:

$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -empty -printf '%p WAS DELETED!n' 

                                    -delete -or -printf '%p: not empty!n'

./dir8 WAS DELETED!

./dir3: not empty!

./dir5: not empty!

./dir6: not empty!

./dir2: not empty!

./dir4: not empty!

./dir7: not empty!

./dir1: not empty!

.: not empty!