[linux] How can I generate a list of files with their absolute path in Linux?

I am writing a shell script that takes file paths as input.

For this reason, I need to generate recursive file listings with full paths. For example, the file bar has the path:

/home/ken/foo/bar

but, as far as I can see, both ls and find only give relative path listings:

./foo/bar   (from the folder ken)

It seems like an obvious requirement, but I can't see anything in the find or ls man pages.

How can I generate a list of files in the shell including their absolute paths?

find / -print will do this

Command: ls -1 -d "$PWD/"*

This will give the absolute paths of the file like below.

[root@kubenode1 ssl]# ls -1 -d "$PWD/"*
/etc/kubernetes/folder/file-test-config.txt
/etc/kubernetes/folder/file-test.txt
/etc/kubernetes/folder/file-client.txt

This will give the canonical path (will resolve symlinks): realpath FILENAME

If you want canonical path to the symlink itself, then: realpath -s FILENAME

If you give the find command an absolute path, it will spit the results out with an absolute path. So, from the Ken directory if you were to type:

find /home/ken/foo/ -name bar -print    

(instead of the relative path find . -name bar -print)

You should get:

/home/ken/foo/bar

Therefore, if you want an ls -l and have it return the absolute path, you can just tell the find command to execute an ls -l on whatever it finds.

find /home/ken/foo -name bar -exec ls -l {} ;\ 

NOTE: There is a space between {} and ;

You'll get something like this:

-rw-r--r--   1 ken admin       181 Jan 27 15:49 /home/ken/foo/bar

If you aren't sure where the file is, you can always change the search location. As long as the search path starts with "/", you will get an absolute path in return. If you are searching a location (like /) where you are going to get a lot of permission denied errors, then I would recommend redirecting standard error so you can actually see the find results:

find / -name bar -exec ls -l {} ;\ 2> /dev/null

(2> is the syntax for the Borne and Bash shells, but will not work with the C shell. It may work in other shells too, but I only know for sure that it works in Bourne and Bash).

You can do

ls -1 |xargs realpath

If you need to specify an absolute path or relative path You can do that as well

 ls -1 $FILEPATH |xargs realpath

If you don't have symbolic links, you could try

tree -iFL 1 [DIR]

-i makes tree print filenames in each line, without the tree structure.

-f makes tree print the full path of each file.

-L 1 avoids tree from recursion.

You can use

find $PWD 

in bash

Use this for dirs (the / after ** is needed in bash to limit it to directories):

ls -d -1 "$PWD/"**/

this for files and directories directly under the current directory, whose names contain a .:

ls -d -1 "$PWD/"*.*

this for everything:

ls -d -1 "$PWD/"**/*

Taken from here http://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2002/msg00033.html

In bash, ** is recursive if you enable shopt -s globstar.

You can use

find $PWD 

in bash

fd

Using fd (alternative to find), use the following syntax:

fd . foo -a

Where . is the search pattern and foo is the root directory.

E.g. to list all files in etc recursively, run: fd . /etc -a.

-a, --absolute-path Show absolute instead of relative paths

stat

Absolute path of a single file:

stat -c %n "$PWD"/foo/bar

readlink -f filename 

gives the full absolute path. but if the file is a symlink, u'll get the final resolved name.

Most if not all of the suggested methods result in paths that cannot be used directly in some other terminal command if the path contains spaces. Ideally the results will have slashes prepended. This works for me on macOS:

find / -iname "*SEARCH TERM spaces are okay*" -print 2>&1  | grep -v denied |grep -v permitted |sed -E 's/\ /\\ /g'

If you need list of all files in current as well as sub-directories

find $PWD -type f

If you need list of all files only in current directory

find $PWD -maxdepth 1 -type f

This worked for me. But it didn't list in alphabetical order.

find "$(pwd)" -maxdepth 1

This command lists alphabetically as well as lists hidden files too.

ls -d -1 "$PWD/".*; ls -d -1 "$PWD/"*;

find / -print will do this

fd

Using fd (alternative to find), use the following syntax:

fd . foo -a

Where . is the search pattern and foo is the root directory.

E.g. to list all files in etc recursively, run: fd . /etc -a.

-a, --absolute-path Show absolute instead of relative paths

Most if not all of the suggested methods result in paths that cannot be used directly in some other terminal command if the path contains spaces. Ideally the results will have slashes prepended. This works for me on macOS:

find / -iname "*SEARCH TERM spaces are okay*" -print 2>&1  | grep -v denied |grep -v permitted |sed -E 's/\ /\\ /g'

ls -d "$PWD/"*

This looks only in the current directory. It quotes "$PWD" in case it contains spaces.

Command: ls -1 -d "$PWD/"*

This will give the absolute paths of the file like below.

[root@kubenode1 ssl]# ls -1 -d "$PWD/"*
/etc/kubernetes/folder/file-test-config.txt
/etc/kubernetes/folder/file-test.txt
/etc/kubernetes/folder/file-client.txt

Recursive files can be listed by many ways in Linux. Here I am sharing one liner script to clear all logs of files(only files) from /var/log/ directory and second check recently which logs file has made an entry.

First:

find /var/log/ -type f  #listing file recursively 

Second:

for i in $(find $PWD -type f) ; do cat /dev/null > "$i" ; done #empty files recursively 

Third use:

ls -ltr $(find /var/log/ -type f ) # listing file used in recent

Note: for directory location you can also pass $PWD instead of /var/log.

find / -print will do this

Just an alternative to

ls -d "$PWD/"* 

to pinpoint that * is shell expansion, so

echo "$PWD/"*

would do the same (the drawback you cannot use -1 to separate by new lines, not spaces).

ls -1 | awk  -vpath=$PWD/ '{print path$1}'

Here's an example that prints out a list without an extra period and that also demonstrates how to search for a file match. Hope this helps:

find . -type f -name "extr*" -exec echo `pwd`/{} \; | sed "s|\./||"

You might want to try this.

for name in /home/ken/foo/bar/*
do
    echo $name
done

You can get abs path using for loop and echo simply without find.

This worked for me. But it didn't list in alphabetical order.

find "$(pwd)" -maxdepth 1

This command lists alphabetically as well as lists hidden files too.

ls -d -1 "$PWD/".*; ls -d -1 "$PWD/"*;

You might want to try this.

for name in /home/ken/foo/bar/*
do
    echo $name
done

You can get abs path using for loop and echo simply without find.

Recursive files can be listed by many ways in Linux. Here I am sharing one liner script to clear all logs of files(only files) from /var/log/ directory and second check recently which logs file has made an entry.

First:

find /var/log/ -type f  #listing file recursively 

Second:

for i in $(find $PWD -type f) ; do cat /dev/null > "$i" ; done #empty files recursively 

Third use:

ls -ltr $(find /var/log/ -type f ) # listing file used in recent

Note: for directory location you can also pass $PWD instead of /var/log.

You can use

find $PWD 

in bash

Just an alternative to

ls -d "$PWD/"* 

to pinpoint that * is shell expansion, so

echo "$PWD/"*

would do the same (the drawback you cannot use -1 to separate by new lines, not spaces).

lspwd() { for i in $@; do ls -d -1 $PWD/$i; done }

Use this for dirs (the / after ** is needed in bash to limit it to directories):

ls -d -1 "$PWD/"**/

this for files and directories directly under the current directory, whose names contain a .:

ls -d -1 "$PWD/"*.*

this for everything:

ls -d -1 "$PWD/"**/*

Taken from here http://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2002/msg00033.html

In bash, ** is recursive if you enable shopt -s globstar.

This will give the canonical path (will resolve symlinks): realpath FILENAME

If you want canonical path to the symlink itself, then: realpath -s FILENAME

find / -print will do this

Here's an example that prints out a list without an extra period and that also demonstrates how to search for a file match. Hope this helps:

find . -type f -name "extr*" -exec echo `pwd`/{} \; | sed "s|\./||"

readlink -f filename 

gives the full absolute path. but if the file is a symlink, u'll get the final resolved name.

The $PWD is a good option by Matthew above. If you want find to only print files then you can also add the -type f option to search only normal files. Other options are "d" for directories only etc. So in your case it would be (if i want to search only for files with .c ext):

find $PWD -type f -name "*.c" 

or if you want all files:

find $PWD -type f

Note: You can't make an alias for the above command, because $PWD gets auto-completed to your home directory when the alias is being set by bash.

You can use

find $PWD 

in bash

If you give the find command an absolute path, it will spit the results out with an absolute path. So, from the Ken directory if you were to type:

find /home/ken/foo/ -name bar -print    

(instead of the relative path find . -name bar -print)

You should get:

/home/ken/foo/bar

Therefore, if you want an ls -l and have it return the absolute path, you can just tell the find command to execute an ls -l on whatever it finds.

find /home/ken/foo -name bar -exec ls -l {} ;\ 

NOTE: There is a space between {} and ;

You'll get something like this:

-rw-r--r--   1 ken admin       181 Jan 27 15:49 /home/ken/foo/bar

If you aren't sure where the file is, you can always change the search location. As long as the search path starts with "/", you will get an absolute path in return. If you are searching a location (like /) where you are going to get a lot of permission denied errors, then I would recommend redirecting standard error so you can actually see the find results:

find / -name bar -exec ls -l {} ;\ 2> /dev/null

(2> is the syntax for the Borne and Bash shells, but will not work with the C shell. It may work in other shells too, but I only know for sure that it works in Bourne and Bash).

If you don't have symbolic links, you could try

tree -iFL 1 [DIR]

-i makes tree print filenames in each line, without the tree structure.

-f makes tree print the full path of each file.

-L 1 avoids tree from recursion.

stat

Absolute path of a single file:

stat -c %n "$PWD"/foo/bar

ls -1 | awk  -vpath=$PWD/ '{print path$1}'

You can do

ls -1 |xargs realpath

If you need to specify an absolute path or relative path You can do that as well

 ls -1 $FILEPATH |xargs realpath

The $PWD is a good option by Matthew above. If you want find to only print files then you can also add the -type f option to search only normal files. Other options are "d" for directories only etc. So in your case it would be (if i want to search only for files with .c ext):

find $PWD -type f -name "*.c" 

or if you want all files:

find $PWD -type f

Note: You can't make an alias for the above command, because $PWD gets auto-completed to your home directory when the alias is being set by bash.

If you need list of all files in current as well as sub-directories

find $PWD -type f

If you need list of all files only in current directory

find $PWD -maxdepth 1 -type f

ls -d "$PWD/"*

This looks only in the current directory. It quotes "$PWD" in case it contains spaces.

lspwd() { for i in $@; do ls -d -1 $PWD/$i; done }