mjhjmtu

I have a requirement to identify and write all xml file names which are empty to a text file for reporting purpose. Empty , here means the xml file has the usual header tag <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> followed by an empty open and close tag.

Sample file:
1)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<STBTests>
</STBTests>

2)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<UMTTests>
</UMTTests>

There are no data in the xml files apart from this. Any suggestions on how to approach this would be great.

Try this using xmllint with a xpath expression :

#!/bin/sh

for xml in *.xml; do
 bool=$(xmllint --xpath 'count(//*)=1 and string-length(//*[1])=1' "$xml")
 if [ $bool = true ]; then
 echo "$xml" >> xml_list_files
 fi
done

cat xml_list_files

The expression test that the file have only one node without any text content. In this case, the command return true

to identify and write all xml file names which are empty to a text
file for reporting purpose

find + xmlstarlet solution:

find . -type f -name "*.xml" -exec bash -c 
'v=$(xmlstarlet sel -t -i "count(//*)=1 and //*[1][not(normalize-space())]" -o 1 -b $1);
[[ -n "$v" ]] && echo "$1" >> "empty_xml.txt"' _ ;

empty_xml.txt file should contain a list of needed filenames/filepaths