Re^3: selcting a specific file

[andyford]

That's my point. -z is looking for a zero byte file, but 'no content' could be a bunch of tabs and spaces.

[forda@hqnagtl1 ~]$ touch emptytest1
[forda@hqnagtl1 ~]$ touch emptytest2
[forda@hqnagtl1 ~]$ ls -l emptytest*
-rw-rw-r--  1 forda forda 0 Oct 22 17:19 emptytest1
-rw-rw-r--  1 forda forda 0 Oct 22 17:19 emptytest2
[forda@hqnagtl1 ~]$ echo '              ' >> emptytest2
[forda@hqnagtl1 ~]$ ls -l emptytest*
-rw-rw-r--  1 forda forda  0 Oct 22 17:19 emptytest1
-rw-rw-r--  1 forda forda 15 Oct 22 17:20 emptytest2

I put some spaces into a formerly empty file and now it has a size of 15.

[Anonymous Monk]

wht command did you select for getting such an output???

[andyford]

Sorry, I should have mentioned that my example is on Unix. The point is that for -z to flag a file as empty, it must have nothing in it. No spaces, no tabs, no nothing.