Recursively remove empty folders

October 13, 2020

Use ROBOCOPY. It is very simple and can also be used to delete empty folders inside large hierarchy.

ROBOCOPY folder1 folder1 /S /MOVE

Here both source and destination are folder1, as you only need to delete empty folders, instead of moving other files to different folder. /S option is to skip copying (moving, in the above case) empty folders. It is also faster as the files are moved inside the same drive.

From <https://superuser.com/questions/39674/recursively-delete-empty-directories-in-windows>

If robocopy not available use this one-liner batch file (from DownloadSquad):

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

If used inside a batch file, replace %d with %%d

This works because rd will not remove a directory that contains files unless forced with.

From <https://superuser.com/questions/39674/recursively-delete-empty-directories-in-windows>

keywords: command-line, cmd