How to limit depth for recursive file list

Question

Is there a way to limit the depth of a recursive file listing in linux   The command I m using at the moment is   ls -laR  gt  dirlist txt   But I ve got about 200 directories and each of them have 10 s of directories  So it s just going to take far too long and hog too many system resources   All I m really interested in is the ownership and permissions information for the first level subdirectories   drwxr-xr-x 14 root   root  1234 Dec 22 13 19  var www vhosts domain1 co uk   drwxr--r-- 14 jon    root  1234 Dec 22 13 19  var www vhosts domain1 co uk htdocs   drwxr--r-- 14 jon    root  1234 Dec 22 13 19  var www vhosts domain1 co uk cgi-bin   drwxr-xr-x 14 root   root  1234 Dec 22 13 19  var www vhosts domain2 co uk   drwxr-xrwx 14 proftp root  1234 Dec 22 13 19  var www vhosts domain2 co uk htdocs   drwxr-xrwx 14 proftp root  1234 Dec 22 13 19  var www vhosts domain2 co uk cgi-bin   drwxr-xr-x 14 root   root  1234 Dec 22 13 19  var www vhosts domain3 co uk   drwxr-xr-- 14 jon    root  1234 Dec 22 13 19  var www vhosts domain3 co uk htdocs   drwxr-xr-- 14 jon    root  1234 Dec 22 13 19  var www vhosts domain3 co uk cgi-bin   drwxr-xr-x 14 root   root  1234 Dec 22 13 19  var www vhosts domain4 co uk   drwxr-xr-- 14 jon    root  1234 Dec 22 13 19  var www vhosts domain4 co uk htdocs drwxr-xr-- 14 jon    root  1234 Dec 22 13 19  var www vhosts domain4 co uk cgi-bin   EDIT   Final choice of command   find -maxdepth 2 -type d -ls  gt dirlist

User · Answer

Make use of find s options There is actually no exec of  bin ls needed  Find has an option that does just that  find   -maxdepth 2 -type d -ls  To see only the one level of subdirectories you are interested in  add -mindepth to the same level as -maxdepth  find   -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 -type d -ls   Use output formatting When the details that get shown should be different  -printf can show any detail about a file in custom format  To show the symbolic permissions and the owner name of the file  use -printf with  M and  u in the format  I noticed later you want the full ownership information  which includes the group  Use  g in the format for the symbolic name  or  G for the group id  like also  U for numeric user id  find   -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 -type d -printf   M  u  g  p n   This should give you just the details you need  for just the right files  I will give an example that shows actually different values for user and group    sudo find  tmp -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 -type d -printf   M  u  g  p n  drwx------ www-data  www-data  tmp user 33 drwx------ octopussy root      tmp user 126 drwx------ root      root      tmp user 0 drwx------ siegel    root      tmp user 1000 drwxrwxrwt root      root      tmp systemd-      service-HRUQmm tmp   Edited for readability  indented  shortened last line   Notes on performance Although the execution time is mostly irrelevant for this kind of command  increase in performance is large enough here to make it worth pointing it out  Not only do we save creating a new process for each name - a huge task - the information does not even need to be read  as find already knows it

User · Answer

All I m really interested in is the ownership and permissions information for the first level subdirectories    I found a easy solution while playing my fish  which fits your need perfectly   ll  ls    or  ls -l   ls

User · Answer

Checkout the -maxdepth flag of find  find   -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec ls -ld           Here I used 1 as max level depth  -type d means find only directories  which then ls -ld lists contents of  in long format

User · Answer

tree -L 2 -u -g -p -d  Prints the directory tree in a pretty format up to depth 2  -L 2   Print user  -u  and group  -g  and permissions  -p   Print only directories  -d   tree has a lot of other useful options

[linux] How to limit depth for recursive file list?

Make use of `find`'s options

Use output formatting

Notes on performance

Examples related to linux

Examples related to bash