Big Data? Pain? Looking for empty folders and want to delete them? In this post I show you how to proceed to find and delete empty folders.
Open PowerShell, ISE or VS Code.
Caution: If you proceed, all empty folders will be deleted without any warning.
Specify the root folder in line 1. In my example this is C:\Data. Then execute the PowerShell code.
All subfolders which are empty will be scanned and deleted without confirmation.
# Folder empty, then remove them
$path = 'C:\Data'
Get-ChildItem $path -Recurse -Directory | ForEach-Object {
If((Get-ChildItem $_.FullName) -eq $null) {
Remove-Item -Path $_.FullName -Confirm:$false -Verbose
}
}
The verbose parameter ensures that you can see everything that is happening.
Mission accomplished.
Categories: PowerShell, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server
My name is Patrick Gruenauer. From Austria.
SID-500.COM 
Hi Patrick,
Some comments about your code :
– in a comparison, $Null should be in the left-hand side -cf https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.core/about/about_comparison_operators?view=powershell-5.1)
See the samples in the ref doc.
In the present case, this doesn’t produce a bad result (only one object goes through the pipeline at a time), but I’m thinking it’s a bad practice to place $null on the right.
– I’ve answered to a similar code recently in Reddit Powershell Sub. I’ve proposed the following code :
$RootPath = “c:\temp”
$FoldersList = Get-ChildItem -Path $RootPath -Directory -Recurse
foreach ($Folder in $FoldersList)
{
if (-not (Get-ChildItem -Path $Folder -Recurse -ErrorAction Ignore))
{# Folder is empty : no file, no sub-folder, remove it
Remove-Item -Path $Folder.FullName -WhatIf # -Whatif is for test safely
}
}
Another user said “When scanning a large volume of data it’s advised to avoid using a variable to gather all results of a recursive Get-ChildItem as it doesn’t leverage the pipeline. In some cases you might use too much memory to cache your results. Using a pipeline is a memory optimisation”.
I agree with that, though we don’t know if it’s a large collection of data (these are directories that I put as variable, not files, there are probably many fewer).
see for ref : https://new.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/16e6mew/powershell_script_to_delets_all_empty_subfolders/
Regards
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