How to tell if folder is empty in Finder?

[seedylee]

Hi everyone,

I am really struggling to get my head around Finder, and I'm trying to work through some niggles I'm having. The first I have is around Finder, and being able to tell if a folder is empty before deleting it. In some cases, it seems that Finder can be quite slow to list the contents of a folder, particularly if it's a network share, but Finder doesn't provide any indication that it's working in the background. Sometimes after clicking a folder, it may take up to thirty seconds for results to be displayed, but sometimes longer if there's lots of other file operations happening concurrently.

So my question is, how long does one wait for Finder after clicking on a folder to see if any results populate? I know it's Apple's ethos not to tell the user that things are taking time to complete, but I've already accidentally deleted a few folders that have actually contained content because I thought they were empty!

 

[bmac89]

So my question is, how long does one wait for Finder after clicking on a folder to see if any results populate? I know it's Apple's ethos not to tell the user that things are taking time to complete, but I've already accidentally deleted a few folders that have actually contained content because I thought they were empty!

You could right click on the folder and press ‘get info’ to check the size of the folder.
If it is taking time to load the info it will say calculating size or something like that.

Alternatively if you want to open the folder first and it doesn’t load anything you can then go to the menu bar up the top and press file > get info to confirm the size of the folder.

Another option - you could single click on folder to highlight and then press the space bar to open quick look preview which would also display the size of the folder. I’m unsure how this handles a delay - I think it has a progress wheel.

Hope that helps. Other people may have different suggestions.

 

[seedylee]

Hope that helps. Other people may have different suggestions.

Thank you - good advice. Unfortunately some of those options seem a little cumbersome, so for the time being I'm mainly performing file management using the Terminal. Interestingly, folders that can take ~30 to list in Finder display instantaneously in the Terminal, even over a network ...

I did find that enabling the Status Bar in Finder does show an indicator when it is working on an operation. I'm not sure why this is disabled by default, but interestingly whilst it is loading a folder it explicitly says "0 items". This is obviously misleading ...

 

[Gregg2]

In Icon View, you can have the number of items displayed. Check out Show View Options...