Gulp task to delete empty files

Question

When compiling TypeScript, I get a lot of empty JavaScript files generated because their TypeScript counterparts contain only interfaces. There's currently no tsc option to suppress generation of these files. I'm using the gulp-tsc plugin to compile.

Is there a plugin or some other means to clean up empty files, or even a more general purpose gulp plugin that would allow me to delete files based on their name and content? Or is there a way to do this in gulp without using plugins?

Answer 1

I think you could relatively easily use node-glob to look for matching files outside gulp, something like this:

var glob = require('node-glob'),
    fs = require('fs);

gulp.task('delete-empty-files', function(cb) {
    glob('/path/to/generated/**/*.js', function(err, files) {
        files.forEach(function(file) {
            if(fs.statSync(file).size === 0) {
                fs.unlinkSync(file);
            }
        });
        // make sure the task runs asynchronously!
        cb();
    });
});

Alternatively, you could use gulp-tap to achieve a similar result, like so:

var tap = require('gulp-tap'),
    fs = require('fs);

gulp.task('delete-empty-files', function() {
    return gulp.src('/path/to/generated/**/*.js')
        .pipe(tap(function(file) {
            if(file.stat.size === 0) {
                fs.unlinkSync(file);
            }
        });
    });
});

They're pretty equal, really. I think the first one will be faster, because it won't have the extra stuff from gulp and vinyl-fs.

You might be able to add the {read: false} options to gulp.src() to speed things up, but that might also disable the .stat from being read. If you want to try it, you add it like this:

return gulp.src('/path/to/files/**/*.js', {read: false}).pipe(...)