How can I check if a file is empty?

Question

I have thousands of text files and would like to know how to check if a particular file is empty. I am reading all the files using this line of code

Y<-grep(\         


        

Answer 1

Use the following code to check if a file in the system is empty or not before uploading it.

my_file<-readLines(paste0("<path of file/file name.extension>"))
my_file=="" #TRUE - means the file is empty

Answer 2

For a functional approach, you might first write a predicate:

file.empty <- function(filenames) file.info(filenames)$size == 0

And then filter the list of files using it:

Filter(file.empty, dir())

Answer 3

You can use file.info for that:

info = file.info(filenames)
empty = rownames(info[info$size == 0, ])

Incidentally, there’s a better way of listing text files than using grep: specify the pattern argument to list.files:

list.files(pattern = '\\.txt$')

Notice that the pattern needs to be a regular expression, not a glob – the same is true for grep!

Answer 4

find . -empty 

or

find . -empty |awk -F\/ '{print $FN}'

If you want to limit just txt files:

find . -empty -name "*.txt"

If you want only asci files (not just .txt)

find . -empty -type f

put it all together:

find . -empty -type f -name "*.txt" |awk -F\/ '{print $NF}'