What's the simplest (and/or most concise) way to check for an empty directory? I can't just do a rmdir as I need to check three directories are empty before I can do anything drastic (like removing the directory). Not to mention that for one application of this I don't want to remove the empty directory anyway. As you've probably guessed this is to check if a maildir mailbox is empty - to do this you need to check if all three subdirectories of the maildir are empty. I can see various rather clumsy ways of doing it but nothing neat and elegant. A Google search didn't turn up much either, just some rather arcane zsh ways of doing it which were arcane enough to be zsh only I suspect. I might get carried away and write a little 'C' utility do do it if nothing sensible turns up. -- Chris Green