Use GNU find to show only the leaf directories

bash shell find gnu
Thomas G Henry picture Thomas G Henry · Nov 24, 2010 · Viewed 17.1k times · Source

I'm trying to use GNU find to find only the directories that contain no other directories, but may or may not contain regular files.

My best guess so far has been:

find dir -type d \( -not -exec ls -dA ';' \)

but this just gets me a long list of "."

Thanks!

Answer

Sylvain Defresne picture Sylvain Defresne · Nov 24, 2010

You can use -links if your filesystem is POSIX compliant (ie, a directory has a link for each subdirectory in it, a link from its parent and a link to self, thus a count of 2 link if it has no subdirectories).

The following command should do what you want:

find dir -type d -links 2

However, it does not seems to work on Mac OS X (as @Piotr mentionned). Here is another version that is slower, but does work on Mac OS X. It is based on his version, with correction to handle whitespace in directory names:

find . -type d -exec sh -c '(ls -p "{}"|grep />/dev/null)||echo "{}"' \;

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