I was getting a little fed up touching every single directory that was empty after I created a new Rails app and than pushing it to a git repo and having it not include the empty directories. So, I created a short quick script to help me out. I didn’t test it more than a couple times, but it seems to do the job. Anyway, here it is:

def touch_gitignore(path = '.')
  Dir[File.join(File.expand_path(path), '**')].each do |file|
    if File.directory?(file)
      touch_gitignore(file)
      if Dir[File.join(file, '*')].empty?
        `touch #{File.join(file, '.gitignore')}`
        puts 'touched: ' + file
      end
    end
  end  
end
 
ARGV.first ? touch_gitignore(ARGV.first) : touch_gitignore

Yes, I’m sure it can be improved. As I said, it was quick and dirty, out of frustration even.

As an example how to run it, if I named the file I pasted the code from above into ‘gitignore.rb’ then it would be something like this:

chris$ rails test
chris$ ruby gitignore.rb test

If you found this useful, how about a recommendation on working with rails?

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