Find all zero-byte files in directory and subdirectories

Question

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

Question also posted on unix&linux - please don't post the same question in multiple places. — glenn jackman
next time im not repeate like this due to problem in my browser in with stackoverflow i posted in superuser but now the problem fixed by clearing history cookies and catche in ie so i asked again here — Civa

William Pursell William Pursell · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-29T12:58:35

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.

Find all zero-byte files in directory and subdirectories

4 Answers