ls command: how can I get a recursive full-path listing, one line per file?

Question

How can I get ls to spit out a flat list of recursive one-per-line paths?

For example, I just want a flat listing of files with their full paths:

/home/dreftymac/.
/home/dreftymac/foo.txt
/home/dreftymac/bar.txt
/home/dreftymac/stackoverflow
/home/dreftymac/stackoverflow/alpha.txt
/home/dreftymac/stackoverflow/bravo.txt
/home/dreftymac/stackoverflow/charlie.txt

ls -a1 almost does what I need, but I do not want path fragments, I want full paths.

Solution 1

If you really want to use ls, then format its output using awk:

ls -R /path | awk '
/:$/&&f{s=$0;f=0}
/:$/&&!f{sub(/:$/,"");s=$0;f=1;next}
NF&&f{ print s"/"$0 }'

Solution 2

Use find:

find .
find /home/dreftymac

If you want files only (omit directories, devices, etc):

find . -type f
find /home/dreftymac -type f

Solution 3

ls -ld $(find .)

if you want to sort your output by modification time:

ls -ltd $(find .)

Solution 4

Try the following simpler way:

find "$PWD"

Solution 5

Best command is: tree -fi

-f print the full path prefix for each file
-i don't print indentations

e.g.

$ tree -fi
.
./README.md
./node_modules
./package.json
./src
./src/datasources
./src/datasources/bookmarks.js
./src/example.json
./src/index.js
./src/resolvers.js
./src/schema.js

In order to use the files but not the links, you have to remove > from your output:

tree -fi |grep -v \>

If you want to know the nature of each file, (to read only ASCII files for example) try a while loop:

tree -fi |
grep -v \> |
while read -r first ; do 
    file "${first}"
done |
grep ASCII

View more solutions

Comments

[SourceSeeker]

If your system has readlink you can do directory=$(readlink -e $1)

[John Keyes]

True, but cd/pwd combination will work on every system. readlink on OS X 10.5.8 does not support -e option.

[jperelli]

-bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long

[n611x007]

can ls parameters like --sort=extension "redeemed" by this solution?

[n611x007]

+1 worked for me with 12106 files, and I could use the --sort=extension parameter of ls

[Admin]

you can also use simply : tar cvf /dev/null $PWD

[om01]

@Nakilon what's the closest thing? Does it display output similarly? How would you easily display similar output with a short command?

[mustafa.0x]

find "`pwd`" if the path contains spaces or some other special characters.

[ccpizza]

@om01: on osx it is a difficult as brew install tree, given you are using homebrew

[pcantalupo]

<3 this command...perfect solution for what I need right now! thank you!

[Mert Nuhoglu]

Can someone please explain the above awk expressions?

[Salman von Abbas]

How is this any different than find .? -.-

[Selvin]

great answer.. exactly what i needed!

[Jake Toronto]

Interesting, because it shows me stuff I didn't know I wanted to know -- kind of like Google suggest. It turns out, I like knowing how much space each file takes.

[mariotti]

A bit late too. Indeed: how would symbolic links be handled in these cases? As I was thinking about this for an "home made" index of files, somewhat like locate on a single file list. But if I could get the full path, as it is indeed my files, it makes sense (to me) to show me the actual ls output, mainly I guess, dates and full path.

[mariotti]

The target would be: get the 12 or more old HD i have (full HD), make a full path 'ls' output, and use it for some fast 'grep' searching. It makes little sense to back them up, as it is loads of probably already duplicated data. Maybe there is some catalog alike tool but I am not sure if a simple grep for when I need it is better. I mean: a full backup system vs a couple of files...

[SRG]

Thanks. I wouldn't have thought by myself of that (nice and short) syntax - i would have used find . -name "*" -exec ls -ld '{}' \; (that one works whatever the number of files is), but your command is way shorter to write ;)

[xsubira]

You can even use printf output in order to display needed contextual info (e.g. find . -type f -printf '%p %u\n')

[kommradHomer]

i couldn't list the files exclusivelty. it always lists the directories too. how can i do that?

[yckart]

@SalmanPK If you give find an absolute path like pwd to start with, it will print absolute paths. By the way, "How is this any different than find" ;-)

[JayB]

This solution doesn't omit the directories (each directory gets its own line)

[kuz8]

ls -ld $(find .) breaks for me if I'm listing a ntfs disk where files have spaces: ls: cannot access ./System: No such file or directory however find with quotes by @SRG works

[Arnold Roa]

any idea how I can remove the filesize wihtout awk ?

[andrew lorien]

Also unfortunately you can't sudo ls with a wildcard (because the wildcard is expanded as the normal user).

[WonderLand]

Use it carefully !!! As said above it also list all directories and the roots directories as well so if you plan to use it to delete a list of files you need to clean this list !

[ilw]

Unknown option '-1'. Aborting.

[Leo Ufimtsev]

Thanks. Btw, would be nice to have this in 1 line for quick copy & paste.

[Nathan]

Can this be formatted with a falg? ie. python pprint.pprint(files)

[IanS]

A shorter alternative (depending on your needs) would be find . -ls.

[jessexknight]

add this to your .bashrc file: function lsr () { ls -R "$@" | awk ' /:$/&&f{s=$0;f=0} /:$/&&!f{sub(/:$/,"");s=$0;f=1;next} NF&&f{ print s"/"$0 }' } so you can use lsr /path to use this wherever

[Jayant Bhawal]

Tried on Mac OS 10.13.3. find: illegal option -- D

[Jasper]

The other answer should be accepted. This is a good second answer and does indeed answer the question as written, but the best solution is the one using find. The intention of the question is clear (which is not that it has to done using ls), and this answer is better only for those who can't use find. The claim this answer is more "right" because it answers the written question instead of the intended one is pretty ridiculous.

[TZubiri]

The correct answer is that you can't. This is just a waste of time.

[Hadrien TOMA]

OP wants just the full path and nothing else. ls -lR wouldn't meet that goal.

[Shayan]

But find does not print file sizes :( I want ls -alR but I want each line to contain full path.

[Max]

SRG modified to find . -name "*" -exec ls -ld -w1 -Q -x '{}' \; shows file names only and quotes everything for ntfs space characters.

[Josh]

Do you mind explaining the awk code? It looks like you are using a regex to catch lines that end in ":" (the "headers" with parent directory paths), but I get lost after that and definitely don't understand the part where the last field NF is being evaluated as true/false. Thanks!

[taltman]

The NF eval is for checking whether the line is blank. It could be replaced with /^$/ for example, but NF is computed anyways. I simplified the awk code as follows, as the provided version is buggy as it omits files at the top-level directory (I edited the answer, but not sure if my edits will be approved): ls -R | awk '/:$/ {sub(/:$/,""); s=$0;next}{ print s "/" $0 }'

[tripleee]

find -ls avoids running an external process for each file and is a lot easier to type.

[tripleee]

@ilw That's weird; I'd think ls -1 is fairly standard; but try just leaving it out if it's unsupported. The purpose of that option is to force ls to print one line per file but that's usually its behavior out of the box anyway. (But then of course, don't use ls in scripts.) (Looking at the POSIX doco, this option was traditionally BSD only, but was introduced in POSIX in 2017.)

[Denio Mariz]

You don´t need the -exec ls \{\} \; part, since the default behavior of find is to print the full path. That is, find /path -type f does the job if you don´t need the file attributes from ls -l.

[tripleee]

@kommrad You could adapt the file example and pipe to grep -v directory

[tripleee]

@Shayan find with the -printf predicate allows you to do everyting ls does, and then some. However, it is not standard. You can use find -exec stat {} \; but unfortunately the options to stat are not standardized, either.

[tripleee]

... In the end, unfortunately, the most portable solution might be a Perl or Python script.

[tripleee]

find without an argument is a syntax error on some platforms. Where it isn't, just find is equivalent to find ..

[tripleee]

Also unfortunately, ls has a lot of pesky corner cases; see parsing ls

[linguisticturn]

All the subfolders will be in the list, not just files.