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

From: Bob Proulx <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 11:17:21 -0600

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.
> 
> 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...

Do you mean something like find -empty?

 -- Test: -empty
     True if the file is empty and is either a regular file or a
     directory.  This might help determine good candidates for
     deletion.  This test is useful with `-depth' (*note Directories::)
     and `-delete' (*note Single File::).

Example:

  $ find . -empty

Bob