Find directories without music files

filesfind

My ~/Music/ directory is actually full of "empty" directories I want to clean. I say "empty" because this directories actually contain files, some contain old cover image files or Thumbs.db files.

I want to recursively delete all of these directories that don't contain any music files inside or other directories inside.

For example ~/Music/Audioslave/ contains a lot of directories with album names and no music files, but I don't want to delete it because inside there are the music files. I want though to delete ~/Music/Audioslave/oldalbum/ if the oldalbum directory doesn't have nor music files nor other directories inside.

Best Answer

I found this example on SO, titled: Terminal - Delete All Folders Not Conatining .mp3 Files.

#! /bin/bash

find -depth -type d | while read -r D
 do
 v=$(find "$D" -iname '*.mp3')
 case "$v" in
 ""  )
    echo "$D no mp3"
    # rm -fr "$D" #uncomment to use
 ;;
 esac
done

Example

Sample data.

.
|-- 1
|   |-- 1.mp3
|   `-- 1.txt
|-- 2
|   `-- 2.mp3
|-- 3
|   `-- 3.txt
|-- 4
|   `-- 4.txt
|-- 5
|   `-- 5.mp3
|-- 6
|   `-- 61
|       `-- 61.mp3
|-- 7
|   `-- 71
|       `-- 71.txt
`-- deletenomp3.bash

Sample run

If I were to run it it would delete the following:

$ ./deletenomp3.bash 
./7 no mp3
./7/71 no mp3
./4 no mp3
./3 no mp3

Other file types

You can simply extend this by adding more -name arguments to the 2nd find command in the script. Example, to add .wav files:

 v=$(find "$D" -iname '*.mp3' -o -iname '*.wav');

That says *.mp3 OR *.wav. To add more or others:

 v=$(find "$D" -iname '*.mp3' -o -iname '*.flac' -o -iname '*.m4a');

I'm sure this block could be condensed if you had a lot more file types using alternative switching to find.

Related Solutions

Shell Find – Locate Directories Without Subdirectories

You don't need to use awk at all. Use the built-in tests that ksh provides, something like this:

#!/bin/ksh

for NAME in *
do
    FOUND=no
    if [[ -d $NAME && $NAME != '.' && $NAME != '..' ]]
    then
        for SUBNAME in $NAME/*
        do
            if [[ -d $SUBNAME ]]
            then
                FOUND=yes
                break
            fi
        done
        if [[ $FOUND == no ]]
        then
            echo Found only files in $NAME
        fi
    fi
done

That little script looks in all the directories in the current directory, and tells you if they only contain files, no sub-directories.

Find the files between two folder dates in linux

Try this:

touch -d"April 13 3 AM" file1
touch -d"April 13 9 AM" file2
find . -newer file1 ! -newer file2 -exec grep -l "pcV6URY" {} +
rm file1 file2

How it works

find can work directly with times but touch handles human-style dates better:

touch -d"April 13 3 AM" file1; touch -d"April 13 9 AM" file2

This creates two files to mark the beginning and end of the time range.
find . -newer file1 ! -newer file2 -exec grep -l "pcV6URY" {} +

This finds files newer than file1 but not newer than file2. For all such files, it runs grep on them to see if they contain your string.