How to loop over directories in Linux

Question

I am writing a script in bash on Linux and need to go through all subdirectory names in a given directory  How can I loop through these directories  and skip regular files    For example  the given directory is  tmp  it has the following subdirectories   tmp A   tmp B   tmp C  I want to retrieve A  B  C

User · Answer

If you want to execute multiple commands in a for loop, you can save the result of find with mapfile (bash >= 4) as an variable and go through the array with ${dirlist[@]}. It also works with directories containing spaces.

The find command is based on the answer by Boldewyn. Further information about the find command can be found there.

IFS=""
mapfile -t dirlist < <( find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -printf '%f\n' )
for dir in ${dirlist[@]}; do
    echo ">${dir}<"
    # more commands can go here ...
done

User · Answer

Works with directories which contains spaces  Inspired by Sorpigal  while IFS  read -d    0  -r file   do      echo  file  ls  file    done  lt   lt  find  path to dir  -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -print0    Original post  Does not work with spaces   Inspired by Boldewyn  Example of loop with find command   for D in   find  path to dir  -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d    do     echo  D   done

User · Answer

You can loop through all directories including hidden directrories  beginning with a dot  with    for file in          do echo   file is a directory   done   note  using the list        works in zsh only if there exist at least one hidden directory in the folder  In bash it will show also   and         Another possibility for bash to include hidden directories would be to use   shopt -s dotglob  for file in      do echo   file is a directory   done     If you want to exclude symlinks   for file in      do    if    -d   file   amp  amp    -L   file      then     echo   file is a directory      fi   done     To output only the trailing directory name  A B C as questioned  in each solution use this within the loops   file    file           strip trailing slash file    file           strip path and leading slash echo   file is the directoryname without slashes    Example  this also works with directories which contains spaces    mkdir  tmp A  tmp B  tmp C   tmp  dir with spaces  for file in  tmp      do file    file      echo    file        done

User · Answer

find   -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -printf   P n

User · Answer

All answers so far use find  so here s one with just the shell  No need for external tools in your case  for dir in  tmp          list directories in the form  quot  tmp dirname  quot  do     dir   dir            remove the trailing  quot   quot      echo  quot   dir      quot       print everything after the final  quot   quot  done

User · Answer

find   -type d -maxdepth 1

User · Answer

cd  tmp find   -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -printf   f n    A short explanation     find finds files  quite obviously    is the current directory  which after the cd is  tmp  IMHO this is more flexible than having  tmp directly in the find command  You have only one place  the cd  to change  if you want more actions to take place in this folder  -maxdepth 1 and -mindepth 1 make sure that find only looks in the current directory and doesn t include   itself in the result -type d looks only for directories -printf   f n prints only the found folder s name  plus a newline  for each hit    Et voil

User · Answer

a minimal bash loop you can build off of  based off ghostdog74 answer   for dir in directory                                                        do                                                                                    echo   dir                                                                    done   to zip a whole bunch of files by directory  for dir in directory   do   zip -r   dir        dir  done

User · Answer

The technique I use most often is find   xargs   For example  if you want to make every file in this directory and all of its subdirectories world-readable  you can do   find   -type f -print0   xargs -0 chmod go r find   -type d -print0   xargs -0 chmod go rx   The -print0 option terminates with a NULL character instead of a space   The -0 option splits its input the same way   So this is the combination to use on files with spaces   You can picture this chain of commands as taking every line output by find and sticking it on the end of a chmod command     If the command you want to run as its argument in the middle instead of on the end  you have to be a bit creative   For instance  I needed to change into every subdirectory and run the command latemk -c   So I used  from Wikipedia    find   -type d -depth 1 -print0         xargs -0 sh -c  for dir  do pushd   dir   amp  amp  latexmk -c  amp  amp  popd  done  fnord   This has the effect of for dir   subdirs   do stuff  done  but is safe for directories with spaces in their names   Also  the separate calls to stuff are made in the same shell  which is why in my command we have to return back to the current directory with popd

[linux] How to loop over directories in Linux?

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