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# Recursively add a .gitignore file to all directories
# in the working directory which are empty and don't
# start with a dot. Helpful for tracking empty dirs
# in a git repository.
for i in $(find . -type d -regex ``./[^.].*'' -empty); do touch $i"/.gitignore"; done;
@dalers
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dalers commented Jan 23, 2013

Thanks for posting, much easier than manually going through directories or creating a hardcoded script that's wrong next Yii release. I must be missing something regarding the recursion though. Is it actually iterative?

@chan-grammer
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just a little question what does `` mean in the regex?

@geirha
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geirha commented May 8, 2015

This does not work recursively. It will only work for the first level of directories, assuming the shell doesn't modify the regex first, which it might since the regex is unquoted.

Also, -regex is a GNU-ism, and is also an overkill here since the equivalent glob is actually simpler and shorter.

find . -type d ! -name ".*" -empty -exec touch {}/.gitignore \;

This is more portable. -empty is not standard, but both GNU and BSD find has it, so it will work on most systems.

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