Another quick answer to the question I see a lot in search queries on this blog: listing directories in a directory. I take it that this question means showing a list of only the directories and not other files under a certain location of your Unix filesystem.
Using find to show only directories
find command helps you show only the directories by using a -type d parameter.
Compare the default find output of finding files and directories under /etc/mysql:
ubuntu# find /etc/mysql /etc/mysql /etc/mysql/debian.cnf /etc/mysql/conf.d /etc/mysql/my.cnf /etc/mysql/debian-start
To the one which only shows you the directories:
ubuntu# find /etc/mysql -type d /etc/mysql /etc/mysql/conf.d
And if you're in doubt, you can always use ls -ld command to confirm that returned entries are really standard Unix directories:
ubuntu# ls -ld /etc/mysql /etc/mysql/conf.d drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2008-03-28 07:56 /etc/mysql drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-25 21:06 /etc/mysql/conf.d
That's it! Have fun with Unix!
See also:
- How to Find a Location of a Directory in Unix
- Unix Commands: find
- How To Find the Largest Files in Your Unix
3 comments ↓
Often the output of find is a list of files that contain nos standard characters for file names, such as spaces, apostrophes, parenthesis,…. I know it's a bad practice but sometimes a lot of files (especially, audio files) come from remote sources. So, if we haven't renamed those files, the output of find can give unexpected results when it is directed to a pipe to be ussed by a second program.
How can we get an autput that programs understand to name files?
For shell programming I find these three methods useful.
Example 1: From current working directory return directory name only
$ ls -d *
bin ect kernel opt sbin tmp usr var
Example 2: From current working directory include local directory "./"
$ ls -d ./*
./bin ./ect ./kernel ./opt ./sbin ./tmp ./usr ./var
Eample 3: Provide the full path and return the directories with the full path name
$ ls -d /*
/bin /ect /kernel /opt /sbin /tmp /usr /var
$ ls -d /usr/*
/usr/bin /usr/include /usr/lib /usr/sbin
Shell programming usage example: This should work with Bourn, Korn and Bash
==================================
parent_directory=/usr
print "Parent: $parent_directory"
# Get pull path for directories in $parent_directory
/bin/ls -d ${parent_directory}/* |
while read child_directory; do
print " Child: $child_directory"
done
==================================
Hope this is useful..
2Tom: sometimes one can use -print0 primary. For example
find . -type f -name '*~' -print0 | xargs -0 rm
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