Question

How can I check to see if a directory is empty or not in Ruby? Is there something like:

Dir.exists?("directory")

(I know that that function doesn’t exist.)

Answer 1

Ruby now has Dir.empty?, making this trivially easy:

Dir.empty?('your_directory') # => (true|false)

---

In Rubies prior to 2.4.0 you can just get a list of the entries and see for yourself whether or not it’s empty (accounting for “.” and “..”). See the docs.

(Dir.entries('your_directory') - %w{ . .. }).empty?

# or using glob, which doesn't match hidden files (like . and ..)
Dir['your_directory/*'].empty?

Update: the first method above used to use a regex; now it doesn’t (obviously). Comments below mostly apply to the former (regex) version.