Using Perl how can I clean up left over directories with no files? - linux

Question

There is a specific directory which is used as a temp/scratch directory by some program.
E.g. /a/b/c/work
Under work multiple hierarchical directories may exist e.g.
/a/b/c/work/
\d1/
\d1.1
\d2
\d2.2
What I want is to clean up this work directory as there are left over files that take space.
Essentially I need to delete all subdirectories under work that the leaf directory is empty.
So if d1.1 is empty but d2.2 has files then delete everything under d1 (including d1) but not d2.
What is the cleanest/standard way to do this in perl?
I thought to use a solution with backticks e.g. rm -rf etc but I thought there could be some better way than coding sequences of ls folowed by rm
Note: Just to be clear. I want a solution in Perl as this is not a one time thing and I dont want to do this manually each time

Answer 1

If you use find command this way you can achieve it.
find /path/to/dir -empty -type d -delete
Where,
-empty Only find empty files and make sure it is a regular file or a directory.
-type d Only match directories.
-delete Delete files.
Always put -delete option at the end of find command as find command line is evaluated as an expression, so putting -delete first will make find try to delete everything below the starting points you specified.
To automate this in shell script follow below code:
path=`pwd`
find $path -empty -type d -delete
or you can give certain input as arguments of shell script like myShell.sh /path/to/mydir in that case the following code will be do the work,
$path=$1
find $path -empty -type d -delete
As for if you really want to go for perl you can find your answer as follows
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Util;
my $path = '...';
my $fu = File::Util->new();
my #all_dirs = $fu->list_dir($path, '--recurse', '--dirs-only');
my #empty_dirs = grep { not $fu->list_dir($_) } #all_dirs;
also a short method
perl -MFile::Find -e"finddepth(sub{rmdir},'.')"
which is explained very good here.