Re: Globbing for Empty Directories?

[Aaron Davies <agdavi01@louisville.edu>]

On Sunday, March 28, 2004, at 02:21 PM, Bart Schaefer wrote:

> On Mar 28,  2:00am, Aaron Davies wrote:
> }
> } Is there a way to get empty directories from a glob pattern?
>
> There's some discusson of this in the archives from a few months ago.
>
> It's not possible to tell if a directory is empty without actually 
> looking
> for files in it.  So the best you can do is something like this:
>
> 	isempty() {
> 	  reply=( $REPLY/*(DN) )
> 	  (( $#reply )) && unset reply || reply=( $REPLY )
> 	}
>
> 	print /path/to/emptydirectory(/e{isempty})
>
> The (/) is important, otherwise you need to test [[ -d $REPLY ]] in the
> isempty function (because as-is it matches files as well as empty 
> dirs).
> If you want to follow symlinks to empty directories you need:
>
> 	print /path/to/emptydirectory(-/e{isempty})
>
> It's much easier to get only NON-empty directories:
>
> 	print /path/to/nonempty/*(DN[-1]:h)
>
> In this case, though, symlinks are always followed because of appending
> "/*" to the directory name, and there's not much to be done about it.

Thanks much. In that case, could I make this a feature request?
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