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How to delete many 0 byte files in linux?
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How do I delete a certain file in linux if its size is 0. I want to execute this in an crontab without any extra script.
l filename.file | grep 5th-tab | not eq 0 | rm
Something like this?
This will delete all the files in a directory (and below) that are size zero.
find /tmp -size 0 -print0 |xargs -0 rm --
If you just want a particular file;
if [ ! -s /tmp/foo ] ; then
rm /tmp/foo
fi
you would want to use find:
find . -size 0 -delete
To search and delete empty files in the current directory and subdirectories:
find . -type f -empty -delete
-type f
is necessary because also directories are marked to be of size zero.
The dot .
(current directory) is the starting search directory. If you have GNU find (e.g. not Mac OS), you can omit it in this case:
find -type f -empty -delete
From GNU find
documentation:
If no files to search are specified, the current directory (.) is used.
You can use the command find
to do this. We can match files with -type f
, and match empty files using -size 0
. Then we can delete the matches with -delete
.
find . -type f -size 0 -delete
On Linux, the stat(1) command is useful when you don't need find(1):
(( $(stat -c %s "$filename") )) || rm "$filename"
The stat command here allows us just to get the file size, that's the -c %s
(see the man pages for other formats). I am running the stat program and capturing its output, that's the $( )
. This output is seen numerically, that's the outer (( ))
. If zero is given for the size, that is FALSE, so the second part of the OR is executed. Non-zero (non-empty file) will be TRUE, so the rm will not be executed.
This works for plain BSD so it should be universally compatible with all flavors. Below.e.g in pwd
( .
)
find . -size 0 | xargs rm
For a non-recursive delete (using du and awk):
rm `du * | awk '$1 == "0" {print $2}'`
find . -type f -empty -exec rm -f {} \;