Comments on: How To List Directories in a Directory in Unix

By: vovets

vovets — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:03:02 +0000

2Tom: sometimes one can use -print0 primary. For example
find . -type f -name '*~' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

By: mr_dole

mr_dole — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:45:20 +0000

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..

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 07:19:53 +0000

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?