Hi folks. Today I had to write script that would delete all the empty directories in a directory tree recursively. Ie, removing any empty leaf dirs, and then moving up and removing the next layer if it is now empty, etc.

I thought that there must be a nice neat compact perlish way to do this, but it seemed to elude me. Anyway, the code I came up with is below, I'm wondering how compact this can be golfed down to by the folks out there that are good at golf. Requirements are to take a list of root dirs on the command line, delete any empty dirs, and then print out the number of dirs removed and the number kept. Ill accept anything that matches /D:\d+\s+F:\d+/ as the output string. It should die if there any errors removing the dirs, and the code need not worry about circular directories due to symlinks or the like. Have fun. :-) (You can assume there are no hidden or system files lurking in the tree, thanks davis for raising this issue.) 

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find;
use Cwd;

my $deleted=0;
my $keep=0;
$|++;
sub recurse {
    my $dir=shift;

    chdir $dir or die "chdir $dir:$!";
    my $dirname=cwd;

    #print "$dirname\n";


    my @dirs;
    my @files;

    for my $name (glob '*') {
        next unless $name=~/[^.]/;
        if (-d $name) {
            push @dirs,$name
                if recurse($name);
        } else {
            push @files,$name;
        }
    }

    chdir "..";
    unless (@dirs or @files) {
        print "X: $dirname\n";
        rmdir $dir or warn "$dirname:$!";
        $deleted++;
    } else {
        print   "k: $dirname (d: " 
              . scalar(@dirs)
              . " | f: ".scalar(@files).")\n";
        $keep++;
    }
    return @dirs+@files;
}


recurse $_ for @ARGV;
print "Deleted $deleted directories, kept $keep directories\n";

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---
demerphq

    First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
    -- Gandhi

In reply to (golf) Recursively delete empty directories from a tree by demerphq

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