2003 server - Saturday, March 1, 2008 6:29 - 0 Comments

Finding and deleting zero sized files

Cool command-line trick for finding and deleting bogus files.

A consultant told me about a problem he had heard about where an IT person restored something on their server and they ended up with thousands of bogus files that had zero file size. The IT person was wondering if there was some easy way of finding all the zero sized files and deleting them. After discussing with some colleagues, the consultant came back with this solution which he later shared with me:

1. Open a command prompt on the server and type for /R %I in (*.*) do if “0”==”%~zI” echo del /f /q “%~fI” >> c:zerosizefiles.bat
2. Look through your zerosizefiles.bat file to make sure nothing important will get deleted.
3. Run the zerosizefiles.bat file.

Pretty cool use of the command line, eh?

Article written by MyComputerAid.com