Checking from shell script if a directory contains files

Question

From a shell script  how do I check if a directory contains files   Something similar to this  if   -e  some dir      then echo  huzzah   fi    but which works if the directory contains one or several files  the above one only works with exactly 0 or 1 files

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How about the following   if find  some dir  -maxdepth 0 -empty   read v  then echo  Empty dir   fi   This way there is no need for generating a complete listing of the contents of the directory  The read is both to discard the output and make the expression evaluate to true only when something is read  i e   some dir  is found empty by find

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Try with command find  Specify the directory hardcoded or as argument  Then initiate find to search all files inside the directory  Check if return of find is null  Echo the data of find     bin bash   DIR   home user test     DIR  1  FIND   find   DIR -type f   if   -n    FIND    then    echo -e    DIR contains files or subdirs with files  n n      echo    FIND  else echo  empty  or does not exist   fi

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Works well for me this  when dir exist    some dir   some dir with whitespace  amp  other characters   if find   echo   some dir    -maxdepth 0 -empty   read v  then echo  Empty dir   fi   With full check   if   -d   some dir     then   if find   echo   some dir    -maxdepth 0 -empty   read v  then echo  Empty dir   else  Dir is NOT empty  fi fi

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DIR   some dir  if      ls -A  DIR      then      echo  There is something alive in here  fi

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The solutions so far use ls  Here s an all bash solution      bin bash shopt -s nullglob dotglob       To include hidden files files   some dir    if      files     -gt 0    then echo  huzzah   fi

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With some workaround I could find a simple way to find out whether there are files in a directory  This can extend with more with grep commands to check specifically  xml or  txt files etc  Ex   ls  some dir   grep xml   wc -l    grep -w  0      bin bash if      ls  some dir   wc -l    grep -w  0          then         echo  No files      else         echo  Found files  fi

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I would go for find   if   -z    find  dir -maxdepth 1 -type f      then     echo   dir has NO files  else     echo   dir has files    This checks the output of looking for just files in the directory  without going through the subdirectories  Then it checks the output using the -z option taken from man test      -z STRING           the length of STRING is zero     See some outcomes     mkdir aaa   dir  aaa    Empty dir       -z    find aaa  -maxdepth 1 -type f      amp  amp  echo  empty  empty   Just dirs in it     mkdir aaa bbb     -z    find aaa  -maxdepth 1 -type f      amp  amp  echo  empty  empty   A file in the directory     touch aaa myfile     -z    find aaa  -maxdepth 1 -type f      amp  amp  echo  empty    rm aaa myfile    A file in a subdirectory     touch aaa bbb another file     -z    find aaa  -maxdepth 1 -type f      amp  amp  echo  empty  empty

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How about the following   if find  some dir  -maxdepth 0 -empty   read v  then echo  Empty dir   fi   This way there is no need for generating a complete listing of the contents of the directory  The read is both to discard the output and make the expression evaluate to true only when something is read  i e   some dir  is found empty by find

User · Answer

Try   if     -z  ls  some dir       then echo  huzzah   fi

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Could you compare the output of this    ls -A  some dir   wc -l

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if ls  some dir    gt  dev null 2 gt  amp 1   then echo  huzzah   fi

User · Answer

With some workaround I could find a simple way to find out whether there are files in a directory  This can extend with more with grep commands to check specifically  xml or  txt files etc  Ex   ls  some dir   grep xml   wc -l    grep -w  0      bin bash if      ls  some dir   wc -l    grep -w  0          then         echo  No files      else         echo  Found files  fi

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Simple answer with bash   if      ls  some dir       then echo  huzzah   fi

User · Answer

Try   if     -z  ls  some dir       then echo  huzzah   fi

User · Answer

Checks whether a directory contains any nonhidden files      usage  if isempty   HOME   then echo  Welcome home   fi   isempty         for  ief in  1    do         if   -e    ief     then             return 1         fi     done     return 0     Some implementation notes    The for loop avoids a call to an external ls process  It still reads all the directory entries once  This can only be optimized away by writing a C program that uses readdir   explicitly  The test -e inside the loop catches the case of an empty directory  in which case the variable  ief would be assigned the value  somedir     Only if that file exists will the function return  nonempty  This function will work in all POSIX implementations  But be aware that the Solaris  bin sh doesn t fall into that category  Its test implementation doesn t support the -e flag

User · Answer

Could you compare the output of this    ls -A  some dir   wc -l

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So far I haven t seen an answer that uses grep which I think would give a simpler answer  with not too many weird symbols    Here is how I would check if any files exist in the directory using bourne shell   this returns the number of files in a directory   ls -l  lt directory gt    egrep -c   -    you can fill in the directory path in where directory is written    The first half of the pipe ensures that the first character of output is  -  for each file  egrep then counts the number of line that start with that symbol using regular expressions  now all you have to do is store the number you obtain and compare it using backquotes like         bin sh   fileNum  ls -l  lt directory gt    egrep -c   -      if    fileNum    x     then     do what you want to do  fi   x is a variable of your choice

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if ls  some dir    gt  dev null 2 gt  amp 1   then echo  huzzah   fi

User · Answer

So far I haven t seen an answer that uses grep which I think would give a simpler answer  with not too many weird symbols    Here is how I would check if any files exist in the directory using bourne shell   this returns the number of files in a directory   ls -l  lt directory gt    egrep -c   -    you can fill in the directory path in where directory is written    The first half of the pipe ensures that the first character of output is  -  for each file  egrep then counts the number of line that start with that symbol using regular expressions  now all you have to do is store the number you obtain and compare it using backquotes like         bin sh   fileNum  ls -l  lt directory gt    egrep -c   -      if    fileNum    x     then     do what you want to do  fi   x is a variable of your choice

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This may be a really late response but here is a solution that works   This line only recognizes th existance of files  It will not give you a false positive if directories exist   if find  path to check   -maxdepth 0 -type f   read   then echo  Files Exist  fi

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Small variation of Bruno s answer   files   ls -1  some dir  wc -l  if    files -gt 0    then     echo  Contains files  else     echo  Empty  fi   It works for me

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Checks whether a directory contains any nonhidden files      usage  if isempty   HOME   then echo  Welcome home   fi   isempty         for  ief in  1    do         if   -e    ief     then             return 1         fi     done     return 0     Some implementation notes    The for loop avoids a call to an external ls process  It still reads all the directory entries once  This can only be optimized away by writing a C program that uses readdir   explicitly  The test -e inside the loop catches the case of an empty directory  in which case the variable  ief would be assigned the value  somedir     Only if that file exists will the function return  nonempty  This function will work in all POSIX implementations  But be aware that the Solaris  bin sh doesn t fall into that category  Its test implementation doesn t support the -e flag

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DIR   some dir  if      ls -A  DIR      then      echo  There is something alive in here  fi

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Three best tricks    shopt -s nullglob dotglob  f your dir         f     This trick is 100  bash and invokes  spawns  a sub-shell  The idea is from Bruno De Fraine and improved by teambob s comment    files   shopt -s nullglob dotglob  echo your dir    if       files     then   echo  contains files  else    echo  empty  or does not exist or is a file   fi   Note  no difference between an empty directory and a non-existing one  and even when the provided path is a file    There is a similar alternative and more details  and more examples  on the  official  FAQ for  bash IRC channel   if  shopt -s nullglob dotglob  f           f        then   echo  contains files  else    echo  empty  or does not exist  or is a file   fi       -n    ls -A your dir      This trick is inspired from nixCraft s article posted in 2007  Add 2 gt  dev null to suppress the output error  No such file or directory   See also Andrew Taylor s answer  2008  and gr8can8dian s answer  2011    if   -n    ls -A your dir 2 gt  dev null     then   echo  contains files  or is a file   else   echo  empty  or does not exist   fi   or the one-line bashism version        ls -A your dir      amp  amp  echo  contains files     echo  empty    Note  ls returns    2 when the directory does not exist  But no difference between a file and an empty directory       -n    find your dir -prune -empty      This last trick is inspired from gravstar s answer where -maxdepth 0 is replaced by -prune and improved by phils s comment   if   -n    find your dir -prune -empty 2 gt  dev null     then   echo  empty  directory or file   else   echo  contains files  or does not exist   fi   a variation using -type d   if   -n    find your dir -prune -empty -type d 2 gt  dev null     then   echo  empty directory  else   echo  contains files  or does not exist or is not a directory   fi   Explanation     find -prune is similar than find -maxdepth 0 using less characters find -empty prints the empty directories and files find -type d prints directories only   Note  You could also replace   -n    find your dir -prune -empty     by just the shorten version below   if    find your dir -prune -empty 2 gt  dev null    then   echo  empty  directory or file   else   echo  contains files  or does not exist   fi   This last code works most of the cases but be aware that malicious paths could express a command

User · Answer

The solutions so far use ls  Here s an all bash solution      bin bash shopt -s nullglob dotglob       To include hidden files files   some dir    if      files     -gt 0    then echo  huzzah   fi

User · Answer

ZSH I know the question was marked for bash  but  just for reference  for zsh users  Test for non-empty directory To check if foo is non-empty    for i in foo NF    do       done  where  if foo is non-empty  the code in the for block will be executed  Test for empty directory To check if foo is empty    for i in foo N  F    do       done  where  if foo is empty  the code in the for block will be executed  Notes We did not need to quote the directory foo above  but we can do so if we need to    for i in  some directory   NF    do       done  We can also test more than one object  even if it is not a directory    mkdir X       empty directory   touch f       regular file   for i in X N  F  f N  F    do echo  i   done    echo empty directories X  Anything that is not a directory will just be ignored  Extras Since we are globbing  we can use any glob  or brace expansion     mkdir X X1 X2 Y Y1 Y2 Z   touch Xf                      create regular file   touch X1 f                    directory X1 is not empty   touch Y1  f                   directory Y1 is not empty   ls -F                         list all objects X  X1  X2  Xf Y  Y1  Y2  Z    for i in  X Y   N  F   do printf  quot  i  quot   done  echo    print empty directories X X2 Y Y2  We can also examine objects that are placed in an array  With the directories as above  for example    ls -F                         list all objects X  X1  X2  Xf Y  Y1  Y2  Z    arr                           place objects into array  quot arr quot    for i in    arr  N  F   do printf  quot  i  quot   done  echo X X2 Y Y2 Z  Thus  we can test objects that may already be set in an array parameter  Note that the code in the for block is  obviously  executed on every directory in turn  If this is not desirable then you can simply populate an array parameter and then operate on that parameter    for i in   NF    do full directories    i    done   do something  full directories  Explanation For zsh users there is the  F  glob qualifier  see man zshexpn   which matches  quot full quot   non-empty  directories    mkdir X Y   touch Y  f          Y is now not empty   touch f             create a regular file   ls -dF              list everything in the current directory f X  Y    ls -dF   F          will list only  quot full quot  directories Y   The qualifier  F  lists objects that match  is a directory AND is not empty  So    F  matches  not a directory OR is empty  Thus    F  alone would also list regular files  for example  Thus  as explained on the zshexp man page  we also need the     glob qualifier  which lists only directories    mkdir X Y Z   touch X f Y  f      directories X and Y now not empty   for i in     F    do echo  i   done Z  Thus  to check if a given directory is empty  you can therefore run    mkdir X   for i in X   F    do echo  i   done   echo  quot finished quot  X finished  and just to be sure that a non-empty directory would not be captured    mkdir Y   touch Y  f   for i in Y   F    do echo  i   done   echo  quot finished quot  zsh  no matches found  Y   F  finished  Oops  Since Y is not empty  zsh finds no matches for    F    quot directories that are empty quot   and thus spits out an error message saying that no matches for the glob were found  We therefore need to suppress these possible error messages with the  N  glob qualifier    mkdir Y   touch Y  f   for i in Y N  F    do echo  i   done   echo  quot finished quot  finished  Thus  for empty directories we need the qualifier  N  F   which you can read as   quot don t warn me about failures  directories that are not full quot   Similarly  for non-empty directories we need the qualifier  NF   which we can likewise read as   quot don t warn me about failures  full directories quot

User · Answer

to test a specific target directory  if   -d  target dir    then     ls contents   ls -1  target dir   xargs        if     -z   ls contents  -a   ls contents           then         echo  is not empty       else         echo  is empty       fi  else     echo  directory does not exist   fi

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Take care with directories with a lot of files  It could take a some time to evaluate the ls command   IMO the best solution is the one that uses   find  some dir  -maxdepth 0 -empty

User · Answer

How about the following   if find  some dir  -maxdepth 0 -empty   read v  then echo  Empty dir   fi   This way there is no need for generating a complete listing of the contents of the directory  The read is both to discard the output and make the expression evaluate to true only when something is read  i e   some dir  is found empty by find

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dir is empty             1                  if dir is empty  some dir     then    echo  huzzah  fi   Assume you don t have a file named   into  any dir you check  it should work on bash dash posh busybox sh and zsh but  for zsh  require unsetopt nomatch   Performances should be comparable to any ls which use   glob   I guess will be slow on directories with many nodes  my  usr bin with 3000  files went not that slow   will use at least memory enough to allocate all dirs filenames  and more  as they are all passed  resolved  to the function as arguments  some shell probably have limits on number of arguments and or length of arguments   A portable fast O 1  zero resources way to check if a directory is empty would be nice to have   update  The version above doesn t account for hidden files dirs  in case some more test is required  like the is empty from Rich   s sh  POSIX shell  tricks   is empty      cd   1  set --          test -f   1   amp  amp  return 1 set --        test -f   1   amp  amp  return 1 set --     test -f   1   amp  amp  return 1 return 0     But  instead  I m thinking about something like this   dir is empty              find   1  -name        dd bs       1  3   count 1 2 gt  dev null       1        Some concern about trailing slashes differences from the argument and the find output when the dir is empty  and trailing newlines  but this should be easy to handle   sadly on my busybox sh show what is probably a bug on the find - gt  dd pipe with the output truncated randomically  if I used cat the output is always the same  seems to be dd with the argument count

User · Answer

How about the following   if find  some dir  -maxdepth 0 -empty   read v  then echo  Empty dir   fi   This way there is no need for generating a complete listing of the contents of the directory  The read is both to discard the output and make the expression evaluate to true only when something is read  i e   some dir  is found empty by find

User · Answer

Works well for me this  when dir exist    some dir   some dir with whitespace  amp  other characters   if find   echo   some dir    -maxdepth 0 -empty   read v  then echo  Empty dir   fi   With full check   if   -d   some dir     then   if find   echo   some dir    -maxdepth 0 -empty   read v  then echo  Empty dir   else  Dir is NOT empty  fi fi

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This tells me if the directory is empty or if it s not  the number of files it contains   directory   some dir  number of files   ls -A  directory   wc -l   if     number of files      0     then     echo  directory  directory is empty  else     echo  directory  directory contains  number of files files  fi

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DIR   some dir  if      ls -A  DIR      then      echo  There is something alive in here  fi

User · Answer

Try with command find  Specify the directory hardcoded or as argument  Then initiate find to search all files inside the directory  Check if return of find is null  Echo the data of find     bin bash   DIR   home user test     DIR  1  FIND   find   DIR -type f   if   -n    FIND    then    echo -e    DIR contains files or subdirs with files  n n      echo    FIND  else echo  empty  or does not exist   fi

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Could you compare the output of this    ls -A  some dir   wc -l

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I dislike the ls - A solutions posted  Most likely you wish to test if the directory is empty because you don t wish to delete it  The following does that  If however you just wish to log an empty file  surely  deleting and recreating it is quicker then listing possibly infinite files   This should work      if    rmdir   target  then     echo  not empty  else     echo  empty      mkdir   target  fi

User · Answer

This may be a really late response but here is a solution that works   This line only recognizes th existance of files  It will not give you a false positive if directories exist   if find  path to check   -maxdepth 0 -type f   read   then echo  Files Exist  fi

User · Answer

if ls  some dir    gt  dev null 2 gt  amp 1   then echo  huzzah   fi

User · Answer

if ls  some dir    gt  dev null 2 gt  amp 1   then echo  huzzah   fi

User · Answer

Three best tricks    shopt -s nullglob dotglob  f your dir         f     This trick is 100  bash and invokes  spawns  a sub-shell  The idea is from Bruno De Fraine and improved by teambob s comment    files   shopt -s nullglob dotglob  echo your dir    if       files     then   echo  contains files  else    echo  empty  or does not exist or is a file   fi   Note  no difference between an empty directory and a non-existing one  and even when the provided path is a file    There is a similar alternative and more details  and more examples  on the  official  FAQ for  bash IRC channel   if  shopt -s nullglob dotglob  f           f        then   echo  contains files  else    echo  empty  or does not exist  or is a file   fi       -n    ls -A your dir      This trick is inspired from nixCraft s article posted in 2007  Add 2 gt  dev null to suppress the output error  No such file or directory   See also Andrew Taylor s answer  2008  and gr8can8dian s answer  2011    if   -n    ls -A your dir 2 gt  dev null     then   echo  contains files  or is a file   else   echo  empty  or does not exist   fi   or the one-line bashism version        ls -A your dir      amp  amp  echo  contains files     echo  empty    Note  ls returns    2 when the directory does not exist  But no difference between a file and an empty directory       -n    find your dir -prune -empty      This last trick is inspired from gravstar s answer where -maxdepth 0 is replaced by -prune and improved by phils s comment   if   -n    find your dir -prune -empty 2 gt  dev null     then   echo  empty  directory or file   else   echo  contains files  or does not exist   fi   a variation using -type d   if   -n    find your dir -prune -empty -type d 2 gt  dev null     then   echo  empty directory  else   echo  contains files  or does not exist or is not a directory   fi   Explanation     find -prune is similar than find -maxdepth 0 using less characters find -empty prints the empty directories and files find -type d prints directories only   Note  You could also replace   -n    find your dir -prune -empty     by just the shorten version below   if    find your dir -prune -empty 2 gt  dev null    then   echo  empty  directory or file   else   echo  contains files  or does not exist   fi   This last code works most of the cases but be aware that malicious paths could express a command

User · Answer

I dislike the ls - A solutions posted  Most likely you wish to test if the directory is empty because you don t wish to delete it  The following does that  If however you just wish to log an empty file  surely  deleting and recreating it is quicker then listing possibly infinite files   This should work      if    rmdir   target  then     echo  not empty  else     echo  empty      mkdir   target  fi

User · Answer

Could you compare the output of this    ls -A  some dir   wc -l

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Take care with directories with a lot of files  It could take a some time to evaluate the ls command   IMO the best solution is the one that uses   find  some dir  -maxdepth 0 -empty

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Taking a hint  or several  from olibre s answer  I like a Bash function   function isEmptyDir       -d  1 -a -n     find  1 -prune -empty 2 gt  dev null          Because while it creates one subshell  it s as close to an O 1  solution as I can imagine and giving it a name makes it readable   I can then write  if isEmptyDir somedir then   echo somedir is an empty directory else   echo somedir does not exist  is not a dir  is unreadable  or is  not empty fi   As for O 1  there are outlier cases  if a large directory has had all or all but the last entry deleted   find  may have to read the whole thing to determine whether it s empty   I believe that expected performance is O 1  but worst-case is linear in the directory size   I have not measured this

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Mixing prune things and last answers  I got to  find   some dir  -prune -empty -type d   read  amp  amp  echo empty    echo  not empty    that works for paths with spaces too

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ZSH I know the question was marked for bash  but  just for reference  for zsh users  Test for non-empty directory To check if foo is non-empty    for i in foo NF    do       done  where  if foo is non-empty  the code in the for block will be executed  Test for empty directory To check if foo is empty    for i in foo N  F    do       done  where  if foo is empty  the code in the for block will be executed  Notes We did not need to quote the directory foo above  but we can do so if we need to    for i in  some directory   NF    do       done  We can also test more than one object  even if it is not a directory    mkdir X       empty directory   touch f       regular file   for i in X N  F  f N  F    do echo  i   done    echo empty directories X  Anything that is not a directory will just be ignored  Extras Since we are globbing  we can use any glob  or brace expansion     mkdir X X1 X2 Y Y1 Y2 Z   touch Xf                      create regular file   touch X1 f                    directory X1 is not empty   touch Y1  f                   directory Y1 is not empty   ls -F                         list all objects X  X1  X2  Xf Y  Y1  Y2  Z    for i in  X Y   N  F   do printf  quot  i  quot   done  echo    print empty directories X X2 Y Y2  We can also examine objects that are placed in an array  With the directories as above  for example    ls -F                         list all objects X  X1  X2  Xf Y  Y1  Y2  Z    arr                           place objects into array  quot arr quot    for i in    arr  N  F   do printf  quot  i  quot   done  echo X X2 Y Y2 Z  Thus  we can test objects that may already be set in an array parameter  Note that the code in the for block is  obviously  executed on every directory in turn  If this is not desirable then you can simply populate an array parameter and then operate on that parameter    for i in   NF    do full directories    i    done   do something  full directories  Explanation For zsh users there is the  F  glob qualifier  see man zshexpn   which matches  quot full quot   non-empty  directories    mkdir X Y   touch Y  f          Y is now not empty   touch f             create a regular file   ls -dF              list everything in the current directory f X  Y    ls -dF   F          will list only  quot full quot  directories Y   The qualifier  F  lists objects that match  is a directory AND is not empty  So    F  matches  not a directory OR is empty  Thus    F  alone would also list regular files  for example  Thus  as explained on the zshexp man page  we also need the     glob qualifier  which lists only directories    mkdir X Y Z   touch X f Y  f      directories X and Y now not empty   for i in     F    do echo  i   done Z  Thus  to check if a given directory is empty  you can therefore run    mkdir X   for i in X   F    do echo  i   done   echo  quot finished quot  X finished  and just to be sure that a non-empty directory would not be captured    mkdir Y   touch Y  f   for i in Y   F    do echo  i   done   echo  quot finished quot  zsh  no matches found  Y   F  finished  Oops  Since Y is not empty  zsh finds no matches for    F    quot directories that are empty quot   and thus spits out an error message saying that no matches for the glob were found  We therefore need to suppress these possible error messages with the  N  glob qualifier    mkdir Y   touch Y  f   for i in Y N  F    do echo  i   done   echo  quot finished quot  finished  Thus  for empty directories we need the qualifier  N  F   which you can read as   quot don t warn me about failures  directories that are not full quot   Similarly  for non-empty directories we need the qualifier  NF   which we can likewise read as   quot don t warn me about failures  full directories quot

User · Answer

This may be a really late response but here is a solution that works   This line only recognizes th existance of files  It will not give you a false positive if directories exist   if find  path to check   -maxdepth 0 -type f   read   then echo  Files Exist  fi

User · Answer

Simple answer with bash   if      ls  some dir       then echo  huzzah   fi

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I am surprised the wooledge guide on empty directories hasn t been mentioned   This guide  and all of wooledge really  is a must read for shell type questions   Of note from that page      Never try to parse ls output  Even ls -A solutions can break  e g  on HP-UX  if you are root  ls -A does    the exact opposite of what it does if you re not root -- and no  I can t make up something that    incredibly stupid        In fact  one may wish to avoid the direct question altogether  Usually people want to know whether a   directory is empty because they want to do something involving the files therein  etc  Look to the larger    question  For example  one of these find-based examples may be an appropriate solution         Bourne    find   somedir  -type f -exec echo Found unexpected file          find   somedir  -maxdepth 0 -empty -exec echo    is empty        GNU BSD    find   somedir  -type d -empty -exec cp  my configfile           GNU BSD      Most commonly  all that s really needed is something like this         Bourne    for f in     mpg  do         test -f   f     continue         mympgviewer   f      done      In other words  the person asking the question may have thought an explicit empty-directory test was    needed to avoid an error message like mympgviewer      mpg  No such file or directory when in fact no    such test is required

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to test a specific target directory  if   -d  target dir    then     ls contents   ls -1  target dir   xargs        if     -z   ls contents  -a   ls contents           then         echo  is not empty       else         echo  is empty       fi  else     echo  directory does not exist   fi

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I am surprised the wooledge guide on empty directories hasn t been mentioned   This guide  and all of wooledge really  is a must read for shell type questions   Of note from that page      Never try to parse ls output  Even ls -A solutions can break  e g  on HP-UX  if you are root  ls -A does    the exact opposite of what it does if you re not root -- and no  I can t make up something that    incredibly stupid        In fact  one may wish to avoid the direct question altogether  Usually people want to know whether a   directory is empty because they want to do something involving the files therein  etc  Look to the larger    question  For example  one of these find-based examples may be an appropriate solution         Bourne    find   somedir  -type f -exec echo Found unexpected file          find   somedir  -maxdepth 0 -empty -exec echo    is empty        GNU BSD    find   somedir  -type d -empty -exec cp  my configfile           GNU BSD      Most commonly  all that s really needed is something like this         Bourne    for f in     mpg  do         test -f   f     continue         mympgviewer   f      done      In other words  the person asking the question may have thought an explicit empty-directory test was    needed to avoid an error message like mympgviewer      mpg  No such file or directory when in fact no    such test is required

User · Answer

Take care with directories with a lot of files  It could take a some time to evaluate the ls command   IMO the best solution is the one that uses   find  some dir  -maxdepth 0 -empty

User · Answer

Try   if     -z  ls  some dir       then echo  huzzah   fi

User · Answer

This tells me if the directory is empty or if it s not  the number of files it contains   directory   some dir  number of files   ls -A  directory   wc -l   if     number of files      0     then     echo  directory  directory is empty  else     echo  directory  directory contains  number of files files  fi

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Try   if     -z  ls  some dir       then echo  huzzah   fi

User · Answer

The solutions so far use ls  Here s an all bash solution      bin bash shopt -s nullglob dotglob       To include hidden files files   some dir    if      files     -gt 0    then echo  huzzah   fi

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dir is empty             1                  if dir is empty  some dir     then    echo  huzzah  fi   Assume you don t have a file named   into  any dir you check  it should work on bash dash posh busybox sh and zsh but  for zsh  require unsetopt nomatch   Performances should be comparable to any ls which use   glob   I guess will be slow on directories with many nodes  my  usr bin with 3000  files went not that slow   will use at least memory enough to allocate all dirs filenames  and more  as they are all passed  resolved  to the function as arguments  some shell probably have limits on number of arguments and or length of arguments   A portable fast O 1  zero resources way to check if a directory is empty would be nice to have   update  The version above doesn t account for hidden files dirs  in case some more test is required  like the is empty from Rich   s sh  POSIX shell  tricks   is empty      cd   1  set --          test -f   1   amp  amp  return 1 set --        test -f   1   amp  amp  return 1 set --     test -f   1   amp  amp  return 1 return 0     But  instead  I m thinking about something like this   dir is empty              find   1  -name        dd bs       1  3   count 1 2 gt  dev null       1        Some concern about trailing slashes differences from the argument and the find output when the dir is empty  and trailing newlines  but this should be easy to handle   sadly on my busybox sh show what is probably a bug on the find - gt  dd pipe with the output truncated randomically  if I used cat the output is always the same  seems to be dd with the argument count

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Take care with directories with a lot of files  It could take a some time to evaluate the ls command   IMO the best solution is the one that uses   find  some dir  -maxdepth 0 -empty

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Works on hidden files  directories and regular files     isEmpty     This function takes one parameter     1 is the directory to check   Echoes  huzzah  if the directory has files function isEmpty      if      ls -A  1      then     echo  huzzah    else      echo  has no files    fi

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DIR   some dir  if      ls -A  DIR      then      echo  There is something alive in here  fi

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Small variation of Bruno s answer   files   ls -1  some dir  wc -l  if    files -gt 0    then     echo  Contains files  else     echo  Empty  fi   It works for me

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Mixing prune things and last answers  I got to  find   some dir  -prune -empty -type d   read  amp  amp  echo empty    echo  not empty    that works for paths with spaces too

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Works on hidden files  directories and regular files     isEmpty     This function takes one parameter     1 is the directory to check   Echoes  huzzah  if the directory has files function isEmpty      if      ls -A  1      then     echo  huzzah    else      echo  has no files    fi

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This may be a really late response but here is a solution that works   This line only recognizes th existance of files  It will not give you a false positive if directories exist   if find  path to check   -maxdepth 0 -type f   read   then echo  Files Exist  fi

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The solutions so far use ls  Here s an all bash solution      bin bash shopt -s nullglob dotglob       To include hidden files files   some dir    if      files     -gt 0    then echo  huzzah   fi

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Taking a hint  or several  from olibre s answer  I like a Bash function   function isEmptyDir       -d  1 -a -n     find  1 -prune -empty 2 gt  dev null          Because while it creates one subshell  it s as close to an O 1  solution as I can imagine and giving it a name makes it readable   I can then write  if isEmptyDir somedir then   echo somedir is an empty directory else   echo somedir does not exist  is not a dir  is unreadable  or is  not empty fi   As for O 1  there are outlier cases  if a large directory has had all or all but the last entry deleted   find  may have to read the whole thing to determine whether it s empty   I believe that expected performance is O 1  but worst-case is linear in the directory size   I have not measured this

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I would go for find   if   -z    find  dir -maxdepth 1 -type f      then     echo   dir has NO files  else     echo   dir has files    This checks the output of looking for just files in the directory  without going through the subdirectories  Then it checks the output using the -z option taken from man test      -z STRING           the length of STRING is zero     See some outcomes     mkdir aaa   dir  aaa    Empty dir       -z    find aaa  -maxdepth 1 -type f      amp  amp  echo  empty  empty   Just dirs in it     mkdir aaa bbb     -z    find aaa  -maxdepth 1 -type f      amp  amp  echo  empty  empty   A file in the directory     touch aaa myfile     -z    find aaa  -maxdepth 1 -type f      amp  amp  echo  empty    rm aaa myfile    A file in a subdirectory     touch aaa bbb another file     -z    find aaa  -maxdepth 1 -type f      amp  amp  echo  empty  empty

[bash] Checking from shell script if a directory contains files

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