Find command: How to find and delete 0 bytes files in Linux

In Linux, "find" command is a powerful command that we can use not only to find files. I've used it for different requirements, so thought of posting some of the convenient usages of find commands in a series of posts.

For some application issue, I've got one of my directories in Ubuntu system swarmed with empty files with 0 bytes. Some of the files got data in them but some of them were empty. I just wanted to delete the empty files and it wasn't possible to identify them by file names or dates.

So find command comes to rescue.

find . -size 0 -type f 

If I needed to isolate the files by file extension, we can use something like this.

find . -size 0 -type f -name "*.tar"

You can get the file count by piping it to wc command.

find . -size 0 -type f -name "*.tar" | wc -l

The awesome thing about the find command is you can use it for deleting files just by adding the -delete flag to the command.

find . -size 0 -type f -name "*.tar" -delete