Windows Command Line – How to Recursively Delete Empty Directories

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I have a directory on my Windows 7 machine that has hundreds if not thousands of sub-directories. Some of them have files, some do not. I want to delete all the empty directories.

Looking at the del and rmdir DOS command, it does not look like you can recursively do this without deleting all the files. Is there a way to do this from the command line?

Best Answer

You can use Remove Empty Directories utility.

Alternatively you can use this one-liner batch file (from DownloadSquad):

for /f "delims=" %d in ('dir /s /b /ad ^| sort /r') do rd "%d"

(if used inside a batch file, replace %d with %%d)

This works because rd will not remove a directory that contains files.

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