I'm trying to find a way to recursively look through a directory and display the full path of the files to the right of the files listed. For example, this is what happens when I search and list all files within the directory and subdirectories:
example here
With Grep, it simply shows the file name but not the full path, which I expected from the first picture. Is there anyway I can show the absolute path?
example here
I know adding -d option can provide this, but it only shows directories/files at that certain level of the directory and if I wanted to show all levels, I would have to keep track of how many levels there are within the directory and print each level one by one.
example here
If you use bash, you can use globstar to expand the paths from the start:
shopt -s globstar
ls -lhd path/**
Of course there's also
find path -ls
Related
I have only two folders under a given directory. Is there any method to choose the second directory based on the order and not on the folder name?
Example: (I want to enter under doc2)
#ls
doc1 doc2
If you really want to use ls,
cd "$(ls -d */ | sed -n '2p')"
selects enters the second directory listed by it, independently of the number of directories provided by ls.
Parsing ls output is not a good idea generally, although it will work in most cases and will cause no harm if you are just using it in your interactive shell for fast navigation. You should not use this for serious programming.
You can use the tail command to get the last line
ls |tail -1
When I try the command ls with -aF option inside any directory whether it's empty or not, I always got the following:
./ ../
so what does the output mean when I have these two options together with ls command?
When you use ls, you are reading a directory file, not actually looking in a directory. Every directory listing contains an entry for the present/current directory, as well as its parent directory, just as you would expect to also see listings for sub/child directories in any directory listing.
The -A option for ls merely tells ls to display ALL files, which includes the entries of ./ & ../ for present and parent. Note that these dots are merely a shorthand that the shell (bash) uses to represent file paths for those files. In other words, what "./" really means is say ~/Desktop if you were currently in the Desktop directory doing an ls. And "../" would mean "~/" which is just another symbolic shorthand to represent your user home directory, which is probably something like /Users/your_username on macOS (OS X), or /usr/your_username for various Linux distributions. Note that those paths could also be written with the forward slash appended at the end and would mean the same thing (e.g., /Users/your_username/ is the same as /Users/your_username because they are both references to other directories (directory files).
Use the -a option for ls if you don't want to see ./ & ../, but still want to see (other) hidden files.
Using the -F option causes ls to display appended characters to the file types based on the file type. This is why directories are displayed with the forward slash appended at the end, and executables are displayed as executable* (with the asterisk appended), and regular files have no appendage (e.g., .txt, .png, .dmg).
In ncftp tab completion only shows the differences of matched files. E.g. with the following files
file123 file125 aa
then typing ls fil will first complete to ls file12 and show
3 5
Question
Can the same be done in Bash?
BASH supports tab-completion which is fairly robust. It is implemented through bash_completion. However, be aware that the way bash_completion is configured will depend on what options are set by default by your distribution. As for its basic functionality, it is exactly as you describe for ncftp. When a partial name is entered on the command line and tab is pressed, then a list of name-matched files are displayed. Once you have entered enough characters to make the name unique, tab will complete entry of the unique filename on the command line.
Linux also provides ls, but its behavior is not the same as you describe for ncftp. ls will return the names of files and directories that match the pattern you specified. By default, the name you provide to ls is not expanded. Meaning if you have file123 and file125 in a directory and issue the command ls file, you will be greeted by the error ls: cannot access bash: No such file or directory. But providing a wildcard (filename globbing) with ls file* will return both names.
If you have additional specific questions. Just leave a comment and we will do our best to help.
I want to list all the files in a directory recursively. I am storing this output in a file that I will later iterate through and use each line as an argument in another command.
However all the commands I have tried have listed the directory name as one of the output lines followed by the files and directories contained in the directory.
I have tried the following:
tree -if --noreport . > files_names.txt
This has given me some success, but it still prints the directories. An example output is as follows:
/testdir
/testdir/rightfolder/
/testdir/rightfolder/file2.txt
/testdir/rightfolder/file3.txt
/testdir/wrongfolder/
/testdir/wrongfolder/file.txt
I have checked the man pages for tree and ls.
Is there a flag or another command that will give me the correct output. I have considered using a flag for tree to list the directories and then removing all those entries from the original list but this is not elegant at all.
You could use find(1) and filter by type:
find ./ -type f
I prefer to seach with locate command but I don't know how to perform a partial search with it.
Suppose I want to search file containing the word libevent. How can I do that?
Locate searches for file names. Not file contents.
The ugly way is to use grep It'll start searching from / directory.
grep -irn 'libevent' /
The better way is to narrow down the suspected directories where this files could exists. Suppose those directories' full paths are /path/to/dir1, /path/to/dir2 etc. Then invoke the following command.
for dir in /path/to/dir1 /path/to/dir2
do
grep -irn 'libevent' $dir
done
The locate command is not searching inside the content of files like grep (and other commands) do. It is simply searching inside file paths.
locate work by using a cache index of file paths, and this index is often updated by the updatedb utility.
addenda
A useful way to search some pattern inside (the content of) some files is to use the ability of zsh or some recent versions of bash to expand the ** file pattern, like e.g.
grep foo ~/gee/**/*.[ch]
with zsh this search inside all files named *.c or *.h under $HOME/gee/ containing foo. I find this feature tremendously useful, and justifying alone the adoption of zsh as my interactive shell. With other shells you might type the much longer
find $HOME/gee -name '*.ch' | xargs grep foo