Unix tip: Recursively removing empty directories
Recursively removing empty directories from a file system might seem like a lot of work. How do you find all the directories and how do you determine programmatically which of them are empty? But let's look at how this task can be made very easy by taking advantage of the normal behavior of the rmdir command.
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Or just use the "-depth" option on find
The -depth option makes "find" search sub-directories first. This should do it:find . -type d -depth -print | xargs rmdir
With GNU find, it's even easier
In addition to the -depth switch, systems using Gnu find have an -empty switch that matches on empty files or directories. Your command can be shortened to:find . -depth -type d -empty | xargs ...
I've looked in some older versions of the Gnu findutils package and it's been there some time now.