What expands to all files in current directory recursively?
Solution 1
This will work in Bash 4:
ls -l {,**/}*.ext
In order for the double-asterisk glob to work, the globstar
option needs to be set (default: on):
shopt -s globstar
From man bash
:
globstar If set, the pattern ** used in a filename expansion con‐ text will match a files and zero or more directories and subdirectories. If the pattern is followed by a /, only directories and subdirectories match.
Now I'm wondering if there might have once been a bug in globstar processing, because now using simply ls **/*.ext
I'm getting correct results.
Regardless, I looked at the analysis kenorb did using the VLC repository and found some problems with that analysis and in my answer immediately above:
The comparisons to the output of the find
command are invalid since specifying -type f
doesn't include other file types (directories in particular) and the ls
commands listed likely do. Also, one of the commands listed, ls -1 {,**/}*.*
- which would seem to be based on mine above, only outputs names that include a dot for those files that are in subdirectories. The OP's question and my answer include a dot since what is being sought is files with a specific extension.
Most importantly, however, is that there is a special issue using the ls
command with the globstar pattern **
. Many duplicates arise since the pattern is expanded by Bash to all file names (and directory names) in the tree being examined. Subsequent to the expansion the ls
command lists each of them and their contents if they are directories.
Example:
In our current directory is the subdirectory A
and its contents:
A
└── AB
└── ABC
├── ABC1
├── ABC2
└── ABCD
└── ABCD1
In that tree, **
expands to "A A/AB A/AB/ABC A/AB/ABC/ABC1 A/AB/ABC/ABC2 A/AB/ABC/ABCD A/AB/ABC/ABCD/ABCD1" (7 entries). If you do echo **
that's the exact output you'd get and each entry is represented once. However, if you do ls **
it's going to output a listing of each of those entries. So essentially it does ls A
followed by ls A/AB
, etc., so A/AB
gets shown twice. Also, ls
is going to set each subdirectory's output apart:
...
<blank line>
directory name:
content-item
content-item
So using wc -l
counts all those blank lines and directory name section headings which throws off the count even farther.
This a yet another reason why you should not parse ls
.
As a result of this further analysis, I recommend not using the globstar pattern in any circumstance other than iterating over a tree of files in this manner:
for entry in **
do
something "$entry"
done
As a final comparison, I used a Bash source repository I had handy and did this:
shopt -s globstar dotglob
diff <(echo ** | tr ' ' '\n') <(find . | sed 's|\./||' | sort)
0a1
> .
I used tr
to change spaces to newlines which is only valid here since no names include spaces. I used sed
to remove the leading ./
from each line of output from find
. I sorted the output of find
since it is normally unsorted and Bash's expansion of globs is already sorted. As you can see, the only output from diff
was the current directory .
output by find
. When I did ls ** | wc -l
the output had almost twice as many lines.
Solution 2
This wil print all files in the current directory and its subdirectories which end in '.ext'.
find . -name '*.ext' -print
Solution 3
You can use: **/*.*
to include all files recursively (enable by: shopt -s globstar
).
Here is the behavior of other variations:
Testing folder with 3472 files in the sample VLC repository folder:
(Total files of 3472 counted as per: find . -type f | wc -l
)
ls -1 **/*.*
- returns 3338-
ls -1 {,**/}*.*
- returns 3341 (as proposed by Dennis) -
ls -1 {,**/}*
- returns 8265 -
ls -1 **/*
- returns 7817, except hidden files (as proposed by Dennis) -
ls -1 **/{.[^.],}*
- returns 7869 (as proposed by Dennis) -
ls -1 {,**/}.?*
- returns 15855 -
ls -1 {,**/}.*
- returns 20321
So I think the most closest method to list all files recursively is the first example (**/*.*
) as per gniourf-gniourf comment (assuming the files have the proper extensions, or use the specific one), as the second example gives few more duplicates like below:
$ diff -u <(ls -1 {,**/}*.*) <(ls -1 **/*.*)
--- /dev/fd/63 2015-04-19 15:25:07.000000000 +0100
+++ /dev/fd/62 2015-04-19 15:25:07.000000000 +0100
@@ -1,6 +1,4 @@
COPYING.LIB
-COPYING.LIB
-Makefile.am
Makefile.am
@@ -45,7 +43,6 @@
compat/tdestroy.c
compat/vasprintf.c
configure.ac
-configure.ac
and the other generate even further duplicates.
To include hidden files, use: shopt -s dotglob
(disable by shopt -u dotglob
). It's not recommended, because it can affect commands such as mv
or rm
and you can remove accidentally the wrong files.
Solution 4
Why not just use brace expansion to include the current directory as well?
./{*,**/*}.ext
Brace expansion happens before glob expansion, so you can effectively do what you want with older versions of bash, and can forego monkeying with globstar in newer versions.
Also, it's considered good practice in bash to include the leading ./
in your glob patterns.
Solution 5
$ find . -type f
That will list all of the files in the current directory. You can then do some other command on the output using -exec
$find . -type f -exec grep "foo" {} \;
That will grep each file from the find for the string "foo".
Related videos on Youtube
Comments
-
Ramon over 3 years
I know
**/*.ext
expands to all files in all subdirectories matching*.ext
, but what is a similar expansion that includes all such files in the current directory as well?-
tangens over 14 yearsMy bash doesn't handle
**/*.ext
. Are you sure it does work for you? -
glerYbo about 9 years@tangens You've to enable
globstar
option as per Dennis answer.
-
-
Zombo almost 11 yearsI tested Ubuntu and Cygwin, and
globstar
is defaultedoff
-
gniourf_gniourf almost 11 yearsThe best answer! but I think
**/*.ext
should be enough though. Also, you won't have the hidden files unless youshopt -s dotglob
. -
toxalot about 10 yearsMy Centos 6 Bash 4.1.2 also defaults to off for globstar option.
-
glerYbo about 9 yearsTo disable
globstar
:shopt -u globstar
. -
msciwoj over 8 years@gniourf_gniourf The question actually asks to include the current directory specifically so no,
**/*.ext
won't be enough -
user139442 over 7 yearsOn Mac terminal and bash with globstar enabled, I found the above solution (
**/*.*
) informative and worked best. The accepted answer caused duplicates of items in the top directory. My working pattern was:"${path}"**/*.*
-
Benjamin W. over 6 years@msciwoj But
**/*.ext
does include files in the current directory. The quoted manual snippet even says "zero or more directories and subdirectories". -
Wilf almost 6 yearsIt would be interesting to try this with other options like nullglob and dotglob
-
dotnetCarpenter over 5 years@BenjaminW. I guess it depends on your config. On my current macOS machine it does not include files in the current directory.
-
dotnetCarpenter over 5 yearsHowever the following works
rename 's/\.js$/\.mjs/' {*,**/*}
-
Benjamin W. over 5 years@dotnetCarpenter It looks like
**
not matching the current directory was a bug that exists in a few versions of Bash: lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2009-05/msg00062.html -
dotnetCarpenter over 5 yearsIt also seems like the bash version that ships with macOS is handicapped.
{*,**/*}
only matches current directory plus child directories but not children of these child directories. and theshopt
list doesn't haveglobstar
. I've tried the bash shell that comes with homebrew (4.4.23(1)) with globstar on and it does the same with my glob pattern. -
SourceSeeker over 5 years@dotnetCarpenter: The version of Bash that ships with MacOS is 3.2 which doesn't support globstar, as you found out. A double asterisk is treated the same as a single one. Globstar was introduced in Bash 4.0.
-
SourceSeeker about 5 yearsWhile this answer doesn't meet the OP's requested "expansion" in the strictest sense, it is most likely to produce the desired outcome.
-
Roger Dahl about 4 yearsNow that it's 11 years later, might be time that someone points out that
find . -type f
applies recursively with the root at current directory, not only to the current directory.