How to get all files under a specific directory in MATLAB

Question

I need to get all those files under D  dic and loop over them to further process individually   Does MATLAB support this kind of operations   It can be done in other scripts like PHP Python

User · Answer

With little modification but almost similar approach to get the full file path of each sub folder  dataFolderPath    UCR TS Archive 2015     dirData   dir dataFolderPath           Get the data for the current directory dirIndex    dirData isdir       Find the index for directories fileList    dirData  dirIndex  name         Get a list of the files if  isempty fileList      fileList   cellfun   x  fullfile dataFolderPath x          Prepend path to files         fileList  UniformOutput  false   end subDirs    dirData dirIndex  name       Get a list of the subdirectories validIndex    ismember subDirs                  Find index of subdirectories      that are not     or      for iDir   find validIndex                      Loop over valid subdirectories     nextDir   fullfile dataFolderPath subDirs iDir          Get the subdirectory path     getAllFiles   dir nextDir       for k   1 1 size getAllFiles 1          validFileIndex    ismember getAllFiles k 1  name                      if validFileIndex              filePathComplete   fullfile nextDir getAllFiles k 1  name               fprintf  The Complete File Path   s n   filePathComplete           end     end end

User · Answer

This answer does not directly answer the question but may be a good solution outside of the box   I upvoted gnovice s solution  but want to offer another solution  Use the system dependent command of your operating system   tic asdfList   getAllFiles     TIMIT FULL train    toc   Elapsed time is 19 066170 seconds   tic  status cmdout    system  find    TIMIT FULL train  -iname    wav     C   strsplit strtrim cmdout    toc   Elapsed time is 0 603163 seconds    Positive    Very fast  in my case for a database of 18000 files on linux   You can use well tested solutions  You do not need to learn or reinvent a new syntax to select i e    wav files    Negative    You are not system independent  You rely on a single string which may be hard to parse

User · Answer

You can use regexp or strcmp to eliminate   and     Or you could use the isdir field if you only want files in the directory  not folders   list dir pwd     get info of files folders in current directory isfile   list isdir    determine index of files vs folders filenames  list isfile  name    create cell array of file names   or combine the last two lines   filenames  list   list isdir   name     For a list of folders in the directory excluding   and     dirnames  list  list isdir   name   dirnames dirnames   strcmp     dirnames  strcmp      dirnames       From this point  you should be able to throw the code in a  nested for loop  and continue searching each subfolder until your dirnames returns an empty cell for each subdirectory

User · Answer

I used the code mentioned in this great answer and expanded it to support 2 additional parameters which I needed in my case  The parameters are file extensions to filter on and a flag indicating whether to concatenate the full path to the name of the file or not   I hope it is clear enough and someone will finds it beneficial   function fileList   getAllFiles dirName  fileExtension  appendFullPath     dirData   dir  dirName     fileExtension            Get the data for the current directory   dirWithSubFolders   dir dirName     dirIndex    dirWithSubFolders isdir       Find the index for directories   fileList    dirData name         Get a list of the files   if  isempty fileList      if appendFullPath       fileList   cellfun   x  fullfile dirName x          Prepend path to files                        fileList  UniformOutput  false       end   end   subDirs    dirWithSubFolders dirIndex  name       Get a list of the subdirectories   validIndex    ismember subDirs                  Find index of subdirectories                                                     that are not     or        for iDir   find validIndex                      Loop over valid subdirectories     nextDir   fullfile dirName subDirs iDir          Get the subdirectory path     fileList    fileList  getAllFiles nextDir  fileExtension  appendFullPath        Recursively call getAllFiles   end  end   Example for running the code   fileList   getAllFiles dirName     xml   0     0 is false obviously

User · Answer

You re looking for dir to return the directory contents   To loop over the results  you can simply do the following   dirlist   dir       for i   1 length dirlist      dirlist i  end   This should give you output in the following format  e g    name   my file  date   01-Jan-2010 12 00 00  bytes  56 isdir  0 datenum

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This is a handy function for getting filenames  with the specified format  usually  mat  in a root folder       function filenames   getFilenames rootDir  format            Get filenames with specified  format  in given  foler                       Parameters           ----------           - rootDir  char vector             Target folder           - format  char vector    mat              File foramt            default values         if  exist  format    var               format    mat           end          format          format           filenames   dir fullfile rootDir  format            filenames   arrayfun                   x  fullfile x folder  x name                   filenames                   UniformOutput   false                    end   In your case  you can use the following snippet     filenames   getFilenames  D  dic       for i   1 numel filenames      filename   filenames i         do your job  end

User · Answer

Update  Given that this post is quite old  and I ve modified this utility a lot for my own use during that time  I thought I should post a new version  My newest code can be found on The MathWorks File Exchange  dirPlus m  You can also get the source from GitHub   I made a number of improvements  It now gives you options to prepend the full path or return just the file name  incorporated from Doresoom and Oz Radiano  and apply a regular expression pattern to the file names  incorporated from Peter D   In addition  I added the ability to apply a validation function to each file  allowing you to select them based on criteria other than just their names  i e  file size  content  creation date  etc       NOTE  In newer versions of MATLAB  R2016b and later   the dir function has recursive search capabilities  So you can do this to get a list of all   m files in all subfolders of the current folder   dirData   dir       m        Old code   for posterity   Here s a function that searches recursively through all subdirectories of a given directory  collecting a list of all file names it finds   function fileList   getAllFiles dirName     dirData   dir dirName           Get the data for the current directory   dirIndex    dirData isdir       Find the index for directories   fileList    dirData  dirIndex  name         Get a list of the files   if  isempty fileList      fileList   cellfun   x  fullfile dirName x          Prepend path to files                        fileList  UniformOutput  false     end   subDirs    dirData dirIndex  name       Get a list of the subdirectories   validIndex    ismember subDirs                  Find index of subdirectories                                                     that are not     or        for iDir   find validIndex                      Loop over valid subdirectories     nextDir   fullfile dirName subDirs iDir          Get the subdirectory path     fileList    fileList  getAllFiles nextDir        Recursively call getAllFiles   end  end   After saving the above function somewhere on your MATLAB path  you can call it in the following way   fileList   getAllFiles  D  dic

User · Answer

I don t know a single-function method for this  but you can use genpath to recurse a list of subdirectories only   This list is returned as a semicolon-delimited string of directories  so you ll have to separate it using strread  i e   dirlist   strread genpath   path of directory     s   delimiter        If you don t want to include the given directory  remove the first entry of dirlist  i e  dirlist 1      since it is always the first entry   Then get the list of files in each directory with a looped dir   filenamelist     for d 1 length dirlist        keep only filenames     filelist dir dirlist d        filelist  filelist name          remove     and      entries     filelist  strmatch     filelist  exact   strmatch      filelist  exact              or to ignore all hidden files  use filelist strmatch     filelist              prepend directory name to each filename entry  separated by filesep      for f 1 length filelist          filelist f   dirlist d  filesep filelist f        end      filenamelist  filenamelist filelist   end   filesep returns the directory separator for the platform on which MATLAB is running   This gives you a list of filenames with full paths in the cell array filenamelist  Not the neatest solution  I know

[matlab] How to get all files under a specific directory in MATLAB?

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