Bash problems?

[Joe Smith]

Tomas Larsson wrote:
> Dear group.
> How do I do to, within a scrip, check if a directory I empty or not.
> Cant find a way to do this in a simple way.

Try these:

function isempty { test "`find "$1" -prune -empty`"; }

function isemptydir { test "`find "$1" -prune -type d -empty`"; }

The first returns true for either empty files or empty directories; the 
second returns true only if the given file is an empty directory.

$ mkdir emptydir; touch emptyfile
$ if isempty emptydir; then echo 'yes'; else echo 'no'; fi
yes
$ if isempty emptyfile; then echo 'yes'; else echo 'no'; fi
yes
$ if isemptydir emptyfile; then echo 'yes'; else echo 'no'; fi
no
$ if isemptydir emptydir; then echo 'yes'; else echo 'no'; fi
yes

Using find to make a direct test is more efficient (and far more 
efficient for large directories) than listing the contents of a 
directory just to see if there's anything in it--not that efficiency in 
shell scripts matters all that much.

Here's some more tests (and some things to watch out for)...

$ if isemptydir /tmp; then echo 'yes'; else echo 'no'; fi
no
$ if isempty /tmp; then echo 'yes'; else echo 'no'; fi
no
$ if isempty /lost+found; then echo 'yes'; else echo 'no'; fi
find: /lost+found: Permission denied
no
$ if isempty /usr/tmp; then echo 'yes'; else echo 'no'; fi
no
$ ls -a /usr/tmp
.  ..
$ if isemptydir /usr/tmp; then echo 'yes'; else echo 'no'; fi
no
$ ls -l /usr/tmp
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Jun  8 19:22 /usr/tmp -> ../var/tmp
$ if isemptydir /var/tmp; then echo 'yes'; else echo 'no'; fi
yes


<Joe