Remove Empty Directories

Remove Empty Directories

Empty directory folders are annoying, but not often a cause for great concern. Still, they build up over time, and Remove Empty Directories is a smart and fast solution. The tiny program greets you with a mostly blank pane and an icon key to understanding your results. There’s a dialog box at the top to specify a particular folder or drive to search, although by default it checks your C drive.

At the bottom is a Scan button. System resources and drive capacity aside, it takes a while to scan an entire drive. When finished, it coughs up a folder tree marked by the key: red folders will be removed, gray ones won’t be touched, and blue ones have been protected, a feature accessible from the context menu. Once you have your list ready to go, hit the Delete button at the bottom and watch the extinction scroll past. Folders that couldn’t be deleted might contain hidden files or be connected to a program that relies on them. The Settings tab provides both basic and advanced options, including Windows Explorer integration, a blacklist, customizable protocol, and setting the max depth for folder parsing.

This app is clearly aimed at those who like knowing exactly what’s in their folder tree, or those who hate programs that leave behind empty folders as territorial markings of their presence. It functions well, and makes a useful if esoteric system utility.

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