How do I open all files in the current directory and all subdirectories using vim?

Question

So far I've been using vim */** which seems to open all files in subdirectories but not those in the current directory, and vim * which opens all files in the current directory. But how do I open all files in the current directory and all subdirectories?

Solution 1

With zsh:

vim ./**/*(.)

Other shells:

find . -name '.?*' -prune -o -type f -exec vim {} +

To open only the (non-hidden) regular files (not directories, symlinks, pipes, devices, doors, sockets...) in any level of subdirectories.

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vim ./**/*(D-.)

Other shells, GNU find:

find . -xtype f -exec vim {} +

To also open hidden files (and traversing hidden directories) and symlinks to regular files.

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And:

vim ./***/*(D-.)

other shells:

find -L . -type f -exec vim {} +

to also traverse symlinks when looking into subdirectories.

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If you only want one level of subdirectories:

vim ./* ./*/*

Note that it's a good habit to prefix your globs with ./ in case some of the file names start with - or +.

(of course the find ones also work in zsh. Note that they may run several instances of vim if the list of files is big, and at least with GNU find, will fail to skip hidden files/dirs whose name contains sequences of bytes that don't form valid characters in your locale).

Solution 2

In bash with shopt -s extglob:

for file in **/**; do [[ -f "$file" ]] && vim "$file"; done

Note that, as per Stéphane's comment, prior to Bash 4.3 this would follow any symlinks in the directories covered.

Comments

[Stéphane Chazelas]

That runs one vim per file though. Note that bash before 4.3 used to traverse symlinks with **. It's been fixed in 4.3.

[jasonwryan]

@StéphaneChazelas Is one vim per file bad per se (assuming we are talking about several files, rather than several hundred)? Thanks for the note about the symlinks: I'll edit that in.