bash script read all the files in directory

Question

How do I loop through a directory  I know there is for f in  var files do echo  f done  The problem with that is it will spit out all the files inside the directory all at once  I want to go one by one and be able to do something with the  f variable  I think the while loop would be best suited for that but I cannot figure out how to actually write the while loop    Any help would be appreciated

User · Answer

You can go without the loop   find  path to dir -type f -exec  your first command         -exec  your second command            HTH

User · Answer

To write it with a while loop you can do    ls -f  var   while read -r file  do cmd  file  done   The primary disadvantage of this is that cmd is run in a subshell  which causes some difficulty if you are trying to set variables   The main advantages are that the shell does not need to load all of the filenames into memory  and there is no globbing   When you have a lot of files in the directory  those advantages are important  that s why I use -f on ls  in a large directory ls itself can take several tens of seconds to run and -f speeds that up appreciably   In such cases  for file in  var    will likely fail with a glob error

User · Answer

A simple loop should be working   for file in  var   do      whatever you need with   file  done   See bash filename expansion

[linux] bash script read all the files in directory

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