in reply to (golf) Recursively delete empty directories from a tree

This one doesn't count directories, and might break if the directories have funny characters in them. It doesn't use much Perl either, but it's waaaaaaaaaaaaaay shorter than yours: 
    `find @ARGV -type d -depth | xargs rmdir`;

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If you modify it to: 
    `find @ARGV -type d -depth | xargs rmdir 2>&1 | wc -l`;

[download]
it'll tell you the amount of directories not removed.

Abigail

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Re: Re: (golf) Recursively delete empty directories from a tree
by Anonymous Monk on Feb 19, 2004 at 05:23 UTC
    if you have the GNU text utilities most of them have a '-0' type option to seperate filenames with nulls. 
    find . -type d -depth -print0 | xargs -0 prog

    [download]
    which helps alot with the funky character problem. also there's the '-exec' option to find. 
    find . -type d -depth -exec rmdir -- {} \;

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    which (i think) bypasses the shell so funky characters are no problem. the '--' option is handy to turn off further argument processing so a directory like '-r' isn't taken as a flag.
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