Subject: Re: bug#12675: find RFE test verb "-inodes"

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 11:23:03 -0600

tag 12675 notabug
thanks

On 10/18/2012 10:41 AM, Linda Walsh wrote:
> A useful thing to be a test on the number of non-structural entries in a
> directory.
> 
> By non structural, it would work like ls -A, and not include entries
> that are
> part of the directory structure like "." and ".." -- with the idea of being
> able to quickly determine if a directory is empty.

So which do you really want - to know how many directory entries exist,
or to just know if a directory is (non-)empty?  The former would be a
new feature, while the latter already exists as a GNU find extension.

> 
> Maybe 'inodes' with standard +/- adjectives
> 
> So "find . -type d -inodes 0" would find all the empty dirs.
> 
> Unless, of course this is already in there and I've missed it... but
> didn't see anything that would provide this w/o calling an external func
> on each dir...which really slows things down...

Sorry, but you've reached the wrong list.  GNU coreutils does not
maintain find(1); for that, you'd need to write to the findutils list.
But while you are correct that POSIX does not provide this capability,
GNU find already does what you want:

find -type d -empty

-- 
Eric Blake   [email-masked]    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org