Recursively delete empty directories in Windows

Question

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? Or is there a tool that would do it for me?

Answer 1

You can use this utility: Remove Empty Directories

Alternatively you can use this one-liner batch file:

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

One-liner taken from DownloadSquad, an excellent site to add to your RSS feeds. :)

Answer 2

The free utility EmptyFolderNuker does this fine, from a base folder of your choice. It also removes those directories only containing empty sub-directories.

Answer 3

If you get the get the error:

"%%d was unexpected at this time.

it is likely you are running directly from the command line. In that case, change the double %% to a single %:

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

Answer 4

The excellent Glary Utilities has this and a bunch of other great features.

Answer 5

Since Cygwin comes with GNU find, you can do this:

find . -type d -empty -delete

Or to avoid the noise when a folder no longer exists:

find . -type d -empty -execdir rmdir {} +

Answer 6

If you have Cygwin installed, you could do this:

find -type d -exec rmdir {} \;