'How to check if a file is empty in Bash?

I have a file called diff.txt. I Want to check whether it is empty.

I wrote a bash script something like below, but I couldn't get it work.

if [ -s diff.txt ]
then
        touch empty.txt
        rm full.txt
else
        touch full.txt
        rm emtpy.txt
fi
linuxbashunixfile-handlingis-empty


Solution 1:[1]

Misspellings are irritating, aren't they? Check your spelling of empty, but then also try this:

#!/bin/bash -e

if [ -s diff.txt ]; then
        # The file is not-empty.
        rm -f empty.txt
        touch full.txt
else
        # The file is empty.
        rm -f full.txt
        touch empty.txt
fi

I like shell scripting a lot, but one disadvantage of it is that the shell cannot help you when you misspell, whereas a compiler like your C++ compiler can help you.

Notice incidentally that I have swapped the roles of empty.txt and full.txt, as @Matthias suggests.

Solution 2:[2]

[ -s file.name ] || echo "file is empty"

Solution 3:[3]

[ -s file ] # Checks if file has size greater than 0

[ -s diff.txt ] && echo "file has something" || echo "file is empty"

If needed, this checks all the *.txt files in the current directory; and reports all the empty file:

for file in *.txt; do if [ ! -s $file ]; then echo $file; fi; done

Solution 4:[4]

While the other answers are correct, using the "-s" option will also show the file is empty even if the file does not exist.
By adding this additional check "-f" to see if the file exists first, we ensure the result is correct.

if [ -f diff.txt ]
then
  if [ -s diff.txt ]
  then
    rm -f empty.txt
    touch full.txt
  else
    rm -f full.txt
    touch empty.txt
  fi
else
  echo "File diff.txt does not exist"
fi

Solution 5:[5]

To check if file is empty or has only white spaces, you can use grep:

if [[ -z $(grep '[^[:space:]]' $filename) ]] ; then
  echo "Empty file" 
  ...
fi

Solution 6:[6]

Easiest way for checking if file is empty or not:

if [ -s /path-to-file/filename.txt ]
then
     echo "File is not empty"
else
     echo "File is empty"
fi

You can also write it on single line:

[ -s /path-to-file/filename.txt ] && echo "File is not empty" || echo "File is empty"

Solution 7:[7]

@geedoubleya answer is my favorite.

However, I do prefer this

if [[ -f diff.txt && -s diff.txt ]]
then
  rm -f empty.txt
  touch full.txt
elif [[ -f diff.txt && ! -s diff.txt ]]
then
  rm -f full.txt
  touch empty.txt
else
  echo "File diff.txt does not exist"
fi

Solution 8:[8]

[[ -f filename && ! -s filename ]] && echo "filename exists and is empty"

Solution 9:[9]

Many of the answers are correct but I feel like they could be more complete / simplistic etc. for example :

Example 1 : Basic if statement

# BASH4+ example on Linux :

typeset read_file="/tmp/some-file.txt"
if [ ! -s "${read_file}" ]  || [ ! -f "${read_file}" ] ;then
    echo "Error: file (${read_file}) not found.. "
    exit 7
fi

if $read_file is empty or not there stop the show with exit. More than once I have had misread the top answer here to mean the opposite.

Example 2 : As a function

# -- Check if file is missing /or empty --
# Globals: None
# Arguments: file name
# Returns: Bool
# --
is_file_empty_or_missing() {
    [[ ! -f "${1}" || ! -s "${1}" ]] && return 0 || return 1
}

Solution 10:[10]

I came here looking for how to delete empty __init__.py files as they are implicit in Python 3.3+ and ended up using:

find -depth '(' -type f  -name __init__.py ')' -print0 |
  while IFS= read -d '' -r file; do if [[ ! -s $file ]]; then rm $file; fi; done

Also (at least in zsh) using $path as the variable also breaks your $PATH env and so it'll break your open shell. Anyway, thought I'd share!

Solution 11:[11]

Similar to @noam-manos's grep-based answer, I solved this using cat. For me, -s wasn't working because my "empty" file had >0 bytes.

if [[ ! -z $(cat diff.txt) ]] ; then
    echo "diff.txt is not empty"
else
    echo "diff.txt is empty"
fi

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