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I see lots of questions about how to remove empty folders, what certain empty folders are, and why they appear, but it seems to be taken for granted that you want to avoid it.

  • Is it really such a bad thing to have a lot of empty folders on a system?
  • At what point, fuzzy or otherwise, does the number of useless folders cause a problem?

(A bit of context: I have a legacy system that creates files, stores them in folders for easy sorting and access, and removes the files when no longer necessary. But it doesn't delete the folders. This has been running for years, and yet there doesn't seem to be any issues so far.)

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  • I would like to see answers for multiple different file systems, even though my particular scenario is only on one. It's more useful that way. May 26, 2013 at 22:37

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At least two bad things can happen eventually, depending on the rate your application is creating folders.

  • If they're all being created in the same directory, you might run into filesystem limits. This question has some limits listed for Linux filesystems.
  • You might run into inode limits.

Both these statements assume a UNIX-like operating system.

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