Find and remove all empty directories using the Linux command line

In order to find and remove all empty subdirectories in the current directory (.) recursively, use this command:

find . -depth -type d -print0 | xargs -0 rmdir

This command will only remove empty directories! Any file or non-empty directory won’t be modified.

Explanation of what the parts mean:

• find: Use the find command to find directories recursively
• .: Start recursing from the current directory. In case you want to start from a different directory, use that directory name here.
• -type d: Only find directories – ignore files
• -depth: Before printing a directory name, print all its sub-directory names. This avoids having to run this command repeatedly because the parent directory can’t be removed since its empty sub-directories need to be removed first
• -print0 When printing all the directories that have been found, print a NUL character between directories. This is required in order to handle spaces in the directory names correctly
• | xargs: Pipe the directories to xargs, a program that runs
• -0: Split the input by NUL characters instead of newlines. This corresponds with the -print0 option to find and is required to handle spaces in directory names correctly.
• rmdir: For each directory found, run rmdir i.e. try to remove the directory if it’s empty.