Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear. More text will be added to what you entered.Ĭlick in the Terminal window to activate it, then press return. Now switch to the Finder and and select the item(s) in question. Paste into the Terminal window by pressing command-V, then press the space bar. ☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name. The application is in the folder that opens. ☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.) ☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways: Only the text should be highlighted.Ĭopy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Don't include the blank space at the end of the line.
One more thing…Subscribe to my newsletter and get 11 free network administrator tools, plus a 30 page user guide so you can get the most out of them.Select the text on the line below by dragging across it.
It is a free utility, and you can get it from our download page:Īs always, there is no spyware, adware – only IntelliAdmin Goodness. So make sure you throughly test before using it. It only deletes empty files and folders, but it is always possible that you have a program that *needs* those empty folders. Please – Please be careful with this utility.
If you wanted it to delete them without prompting you:īetter yet, if we wanted to see what it would delete before taking any action:įinally, we can also remove any files that have a zero size too using the -f option: So, for example, if we wanted to remove all empty folders from c:\DataFolder, including sub folders – We would call it like this: l list what would be deleted (Will not delete) The utility is called DelEmpty.exe, a command line tool: Over a few weeks, Steve was gracious enough to work with me and develop a solution that worked well. Lots of special cases like this, and that is what makes it much more difficult than I originally thought. This means you need to delete the deepest paths first, and work backwards. But now that they are removed, Folder2 is empty as well.
It would be easy to find EmptyFolder1, and EmptyFolder2. Sent it off to Steve to try, and when he emailed me back I realized how tough of a problem this is.įor example, if you were looking to remove empty directories from this structure:
In my arrogance I thought this would be such an easy task, and coded a utility in less than an hour.
I am old-school, having started as a UNIX system programmer some … 40 years ago:-) So, I like elegant solutions, and in UNIX, this would be a simple one-line piped solution … unfortunately, I’ve been stuck on Windows for the past few decades…I’m wondering if you’ve ever tackled this, and, if so, if there’s anything you can share?” I have found all sorts of approaches to this, but none are elegant. “…I want to round out this junk cleaning by trashing empty directories as well. A few months ago I received an email from Steve in Ontario: