Script to find empty files in the current directory? [duplicate]

Im trying to write a script that can search the current directory for empty files, followed by a count of the empty files. I would also prefer the files to be one per line of the output. For example the program output would look like:

Empty files are:
file1.pdf
file4.cpp
example-file
Number of empty files: 3

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3 Answers

If you don't need to recurse (i.e. descend into / count empty files inside subdirectories) then you can just use standard file tests e.g.

n=0
for f in *; do [[ -f "$f" ]] && [[ ! -s "$f" ]] && { echo "$f"; ((n++)); }
done
echo "Number of empty files: $n"

From help test:

 -f FILE True if file exists and is a regular file. -s FILE True if file exists and is not empty.

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Size of the empty file is typically zero. So running the following script will help to find the empty files

find /home/ -type f -size oc -exec ls {} \;

As units you can use:

b – for 512-byte blocks (this is the default if no suffix is used)
c – for bytes
w – for two-byte words
k – for Kilobytes (units of 1024 bytes)
M – for Megabytes (units of 1048576 bytes)
G – for Gigabytes (units of 1073741824 bytes)

i created some empty files and kept it in the following directory

/home/um/Documents/hello

Now lets see all the empty files that i have created

cd /home/um/Documents/hello This command changes the directory to hello

ls -sh It list all the files including the size in human readable format in /home/um/Documents/hello

16K empty.odt 12K empty.pdf 8.0K empty.txt 16K excel.ods

However the size of these files are in the range of 0 - 20 kb I am sure these file are empty

So it is possible to sort all files based on size.

find /home/um/Documents/hello -type pdf -size -20k -exec ls -lh {} \;

It sort all the files that are lesser than 20kb

You can use the find command to look for empty files

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -empty | tee /dev/tty | wc -l

Where

• -maxdepth 1 only look in current directory and not subdirectories
• -type f looks only for files, not directories
• -empty checks for empty files
• tee /dev/tty send filename to the terminal and to wc
• wc -l count the files

See man find for more information.

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