Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > can someone give me a hint how I can efficient test if a certain directory > is empty in the postrm (shell script)? If you only want to know if it's empty because you want to remove it, then there's a very simple solution: rmdir directory 2>/dev/null || true The rmdir will fail if it's not empty :) (You can use its return code if you need to check if it succeeded) Richard Braakman