linuxshell

Find all zero-byte files in directory and subdirectories


How can I find all zero-byte files in a directory and its subdirectories?

I have done this:

#!/bin/bash
lns=`vdir -R *.* $dir| awk '{print $8"\t"$5}'`
temp=""
for file in $lns; do
    if test $file = "0"; then
        printf $temp"\t"$file"\n"
    fi
    temp=$file
done

But, I only get results in the current directory, not subdirs, and if any file name contains a space then I get only first word followed by tab


Solution

  • To print the names of all files in and below $dir of size 0:

    find "$dir" -size 0
    

    Note that not all implementations of find will produce output by default, so you may need to do:

    find "$dir" -size 0 -print
    

    Two comments on the final loop in the question:

    Rather than iterating over every other word in a string and seeing if the alternate values are zero, you can partially eliminate the issue you're having with whitespace by iterating over lines. eg:

    printf '1 f1\n0 f 2\n10 f3\n' | while read size path; do
        test "$size" -eq 0 && echo "$path"; done
    

    Note that this will fail in your case if any of the paths output by ls contain newlines, and this reinforces 2 points: don't parse ls, and have a sane naming policy that doesn't allow whitespace in paths.

    Secondly, to output the data from the loop, there is no need to store the output in a variable just to echo it. If you simply let the loop write its output to stdout, you accomplish the same thing but avoid storing it.