Use GNU find to show only the leaf directories

You can use -links if your filesystem is POSIX compliant (ie, a directory has a link for each subdirectory in it, a link from its parent and a link to self, thus a count of 2 link if it has no subdirectories).

The following command should do what you want:

find dir -type d -links 2

However, it does not seems to work on Mac OS X (as @Piotr mentionned). Here is another version that is slower, but does work on Mac OS X. It is based on his version, with correction to handle whitespace in directory names:

find . -type d -exec sh -c '(ls -p "{}"|grep />/dev/null)||echo "{}"' \;

• That worked. Thank you! – Thomas G Henry Nov 24 '10 at 18:08
• @SylvainDefresne, any idea if it will work on NetApp file system over NFS? – Oz123 Aug 12 '13 at 8:57
• I just used the first version (-links 2) on an NetApp over NFS. So the answer is yes. – Paul Holbrook Aug 1 '14 at 12:37
• Similarly, the simple soln doesn't seem to work in Cygwin (windows 7), but the extended OSx version does – Eric B. Jan 5 '15 at 19:16
• 1
  in my btrfs system directories have link count 1, so this doesn't work. – miguel.negrao May 19 '16 at 11:03

I just found another solution to this that works on both Linux & macOS (without find -exec)!

It involves sort (twice) and awk:

find dir -type d | sort -r | awk 'a!~"^"$0{a=$0;print}' | sort

Explanation:

1. sort the find output in reverse order

   • now you have subdirectories appear first, then their parents

2. use awk to omit lines if the current line is a prefix of the previous line

   • (this command is from the answer here)
   • now you eliminated "all parent directories" (you're left with parent dirs)
3. sort them (so it looks like the normal find output)
4. Voila! Fast and portable.

@Sylvian solution didn't work for me on mac os x for some obscure reason. So I've came up with a bit more direct solution. Hope this will help someone:

find . -type d  -print0 | xargs -0 -IXXX sh -c '(ls -p XXX | grep / >/dev/null) || echo XXX' ;

Explanation:

• ls -p ends directories with '/'
• so (ls -p XXX | grep / >/dev/null) returns 0 if there is no directories
• -print0 && -0 is to make xargs handle spaces in directory names

Here is solution which works on Linux and OS X:

find . -type d -execdir bash -c '[ "$(find {} -mindepth 1 -type d)" ] || echo $PWD/{}' \; 

or:

find . -type d -execdir sh -c 'test -z "$(find "{}" -mindepth 1 -type d)" && echo $PWD/{}' \;

What about this one ? It's portable and it doesn't depend on finnicky linking counts. Note however that it's important to put root/folder without the trailing /.

find root/folder -type d | awk '{ if (length($0)<length(prev) || substr($0,1,length(prev))!=prev) print prev; prev=($0 "/") } END { print prev }'