[linux] How can I run dos2unix on an entire directory?

I have to convert an entire directory using dos2unix. I am not able to figure out how to do this.

This question is related to linux dos2unix

The answer is


It's probably best to skip hidden files and folders, such as .git. So instead of using find, if your bash version is recent enough or if you're using zsh, just do:

dos2unix **

Note that for Bash, this will require:

shopt -s globstar

....but this is a useful enough feature that you should honestly just put it in your .bashrc anyway.

If you don't want to skip hidden files and folders, but you still don't want to mess with find (and I wouldn't blame you), you can provide a second recursive-glob argument to match only hidden entries:

dos2unix ** **/.*

Note that in both cases, the glob will expand to include directories, so you will see the following warning (potentially many times over): Skipping <dir>, not a regular file.


A common use case appears to be to standardize line endings for all files committed to a Git repository:

git ls-files | xargs dos2unix

Keep in mind that certain files (e.g. *.sln, *.bat) etc are only used on Windows operating systems and should keep the CRLF ending:

git ls-files '*.sln' '*.bat' | xargs unix2dos

If necessary, use .gitattributes


I've googled this like a million times, so my solution is to just put this bash function in your environment.

.bashrc or .profile or whatever

dos2unixd() {
  find $1 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 dos2unix
}

Usage

$ dos2unixd ./somepath

This way you still have the original command dos2unix and it's easy to remember this one dos2unixd.


For any Solaris users (am using 5.10, may apply to newer versions too, as well as other unix systems):

dos2unix doesn't default to overwriting the file, it will just print the updated version to stdout, so you will have to specify the source and target, i.e. the same name twice:

find . -type f -exec dos2unix {} {} \;

I think the simplest way is:

dos2unix $(find . -type f)

If it's a large directory you may want to consider running with multiple processors:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 -P 4 dos2unix 

This will pass 1 file at a time, and use 4 processors.


As I happened to be poorly satisfied by dos2unix, I rolled out my own simple utility. Apart of a few advantages in speed and predictability, the syntax is also a bit simpler :

endlines unix *

And if you want it to go down into subdirectories (skipping hidden dirs and non-text files) :

endlines unix -r .

endlines is available here https://github.com/mdolidon/endlines


I have had the same problem and thanks to the posts here I have solved it. I knew that I have around a hundred files and I needed to run it for *.js files only. find . -type f -name '*.js' -print0 | xargs -0 dos2unix

Thank you all for your help.


for FILE in /var/www/html/files/*
do
 /usr/bin/dos2unix FILE
done

If there is no sub-directory, you can also take

ls | xargs -I {} dos2unix "{}"