How to search for zero kb files and find larger equivalent

Question

I had an issue with my Linux SAMBA server and it has corrupted a good few of my photos (several hundreds of files in tens of directories). I have a Mac with a time machine backup and it has a good number of the originals throughout.

With the SAMBA share mounted on my mac I can search for zero kb files

find /Volumes/Photos/ f -empty -not -path '*/\.*'

How can I expand this command to search my mounted time machine to see if any zero kb files have a non corrupt equivalent?

I'm thinking I need a bash script. Or maybe Python.

Answer 1

I could only test the following on linux and not on mac, but I don't think it uses anything non-standard.

Won't work if filenames exists starting with dash - or if any filenames contain the newline character.

I started with a directory containing the following:

$ find -type f | xargs du -h
4,0K    ./find_empty_dupes.sh
4,0K    ./sub/sub2/corrupt.txt
0   ./sub/corrupt.txt
0   ./sub/empty.txt

And ran the following script:

#!/bin/bash

find . -type f -empty | while IFS= read -r file; do
    if find . -name "$(basename "$file")" -not -empty | grep -q '.'; then
        echo "$file"
    fi
done

This is the test run:

$ ./find_empty_dupes.sh 
./sub/corrupt.txt