bashshellfindgnu

Use GNU find to show only the leaf directories

I'm trying to use GNU find to find only the directories that contain no other directories, but may or may not contain regular files.

My best guess so far has been:

find dir -type d \( -not -exec ls -dA ';' \)

but this just gets me a long list of "."

Thanks!

Solution

  • You can use -links if your filesystem is POSIX compliant (i.e. a directory has a link for each subdirectory in it, a link from its parent and a link to itself, thus a count of 2 links if it has no subdirectories).

    The following command should do what you want:

    find dir -type d -links 2

    However, it does not seems to work on Mac OS X (as @Piotr mentioned). Here is another version that is slower, but does work on Mac OS X. It is based on his version, with a correction to handle whitespace in directory names:

    find . -type d -exec sh -c '(ls -p "{}"|grep />/dev/null)||echo "{}"' \;