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Remove all the versioned-but-empty directories from a Subversion checkout

find . -name .svn -type d | while read ss; do dir=$(dirname "$ss"); test $(ls -a "$dir" | wc -l) == 3 && echo "svn rm \"$dir\""; done

November 27, 2011bashoneliners

Explanation

Empty directories in version control stink. Most probably they shouldn't be there. Such directories have a single subdirectory in them named ".svn", and no other files or subdirectories.

  • The "find" searches for files files named .svn that are directories
  • The "while" assigns each line in the input to the variable ss
  • The "dirname" gets the parent directory of a path, the quotes are necessary for paths with spaces
  • ls -a should output 3 lines if the directory is in fact empty: ".", "..", and ".svn"
  • If the test is true and there are precisely 3 files in the directory, echo what we want to do
  • If the output of the one-liner looks good, pipe it to | sh to really execute