Linux get all files in directory

How to list all files in a directory with absolute paths

I need a file (preferably a .list file) which contains the absolute path of every file in a directory.

/Users/haddad/dir1/file1.txt /Users/haddad/dir1/file2.txt /Users/haddad/dir1/file3.txt 

11 Answers 11

You can use find. Assuming that you want only regular files, you can do:

find /path/to/dir -type f > listOfFiles.list 

You can adjust the type parameter as appropriate if you want other types of files.

+1 for pointing a more future-proof solution that ls . This find does recurse the subdirectories, for non-recursive you need to add -maxdepth 1 before -type argument.

find «$(pwd)» -type f > listOfFiles.txt will list files w.r.t. working directory. Note: the file listOfFiles.txt will also be listed in this approach.

ls -d "$PWD"/* > listOfFiles.list 

That command works in any Linux or UNIX operating system. If you want to get one file per line, you need to use ls -d -1 $PWD/*

if your file names are long or terminal width is narrow,, yes, that will be the case, but say you maximized the terminal window to occupy the whole screen or your file names (including the path) are really short, that will not hold true. -1 option guarantees you get one filename per line

@MelBurslan ‘s addition is only needed if output is to a termiinal. ls detects if output is is to a file or terminal.

this will fail if there are many thousands of files in the directory, i.e. enough to exceed the maximum command line size (made more likely by the fact that the shell is expanding the filenames with full path). @Andy Dalton’s find answer is a better solution, as it won’t fail no matter how many files are to be listed.

ls -d "$PWD"/* > listOfFiles.list 

It’s the shell that computes the list of (non-hidden) files in the directory and passes the list to ls . ls just prints that list here, so you could as well do:

Note that it doesn’t include hidden files, includes files of any type (including directories) and if there’s no non-hidden file in the directory, in POSIX/csh/rc shells, you’d get /current/wd/* as output. Also, since the newline character is as valid as any in a file path, if you separate the file paths with newline characters, you won’t be able to use that resulting file to get back to the list of file reliably.

With the zsh shell, you could do instead:

print -rNC1 $PWD/*(ND-.) > listOfFiles.list 

• -rC1 prints r aw on 1 C olumn.
• -N , output records are NUL-delimited instead of newline-delimited (lines) as NUL is the only character that can’t be found in a file name.
• N : expands to nothing if there’s no matching file ( nullglob )
• D : include hidden files ( dotglob ).
• -. : include only regular files ( . ) after symlink resolution ( — ).

Then, you’d be able to do something like:

To remove those files for instance.

You could also use the 😛 modifier in the glob qualifiers to get the equivalent of realpath() on the files expanded from the globs (gets a full path exempt of any symlink component):

print -rNC1 -- *(ND-.:P) > listOfFiles.list 

Using printf has the added bonus that you won’t get a ‘command line too long’ error if you have thousands of files as printf is not run as a separate process.

@AdrianPronk, yes, except in shells where printf is not built-in like pdksh and some of its derivatives or most versions of the Bourne shell. One drawback compared to ls -d is that if there’s no non-hidden file in there, it will print /path/to/* while ls will give you an error about that file not existing instead.

To see just regular files —

Another way with tree , not mentioned here, it goes recursively and unlike find or ls you don’t have any errors (like: Permission denied , Not a directory ) you also get the absolute path in case you want to feed the files to xargs or other command

tree -fai /pathYouWantToList >listOfFiles.list 

-a All files are printed. By default tree does not print hidden files (those beginning with a dot `.'). In no event does tree print the file system constructs `.' (current directory) and `..' (previous directory). -i Makes tree not print the indentation lines, useful when used in conjunction with the -f option. -f Prints the full path prefix for each file. 

sudo apt install tree on Ubuntu/Debian

sudo yum install tree on CentOS/Fedora

sudo zypper install tree on OpenSUSE

@rogerdpack sudo apt install tree on Ubuntu sudo yum install tree on CentOS sudo zypper install tree on OpenSUSE

You can just use realpath or readlink this naughty way:

When ls prints to a TTY it formats the file names in columns, but when it’s writing to a file, pipe, or other non-TTY it behaves like ls -1 and prints one file name per line. You can check this by running ls | cat in place of ls . [1]

• xargs build and execute command lines from standard input.
• realpath : return the canonicalized absolute pathname
• readlink : read value of a symbolic link
• Use realpath — to make it treat everything that follows as parameters instead of options, if files could have » -something «.
• If some files have spaces you could:

@rogerdpack do you have coreutils package installed? I get that info with dpkg -S /usr/bin/realpath . Check out this.

In a past Linux environment, I had a resolve command that would standardize paths, including making a relative path into an absolute path. I can’t find it now, so maybe it was written by someone in that organization.

You can make your own script using functions in the Python or Perl standard libraries (and probably other languages too).

#!/bin/env python import sys import os.path for path in sys.argv: print os.path.abspath(path) 

#!/bin/env perl use warnings; use Cwd qw ( abs_path ); foreach (@ARGV)

Then, you would solve your problem with:

resolve.py * > listOfFiles.list 

With this command, you can also do things like this:

cd /root/dir1/dir2/dir3 resolve.py ../../dir4/foo.txt # prints /root/dir1/dir4/foo.txt 

Recursive files can be listed by many ways in linus. Here i am sharing one liner script to clear all logs of files(only files) from /var/log/ directory and second check recently which logs file has made an entry.

find /var/log/ -type f #listing file recursively 

for i in $(find $PWD -type f) ; do cat /dev/null > "$i" ; done #empty files recursively 

ls -ltr $(find /var/log/ -type f ) # listing file used in recent 

note: for directory location you can also pass $PWD instead of /var/log.

I find bash find $(pwd) works well. Also, ls | xargs realpath works. You can add any other flags to the latter example as well as the first.

To list the full path of all commands (apps/programs) accessible to the user. (revised to address most, but not all limitations outlined in the comments)

eval ls -d $(echo $PATH | sed -e 's|^:|.:|' -e 's|:$|. |' -e 's|:|/[[:word:]]* |g') 2>/dev/null | sort 

NOTE
The PATH variable would normally have a colon ( : ) either at the beginning or at the end, but not both. A colon at the beginning or end signifies to search the current directory as well. Standard practice is for it to be at the end so as to never override standard utility programs. The sed substitutions here handle either case.

Explanation.

ls: cannot access ‘./[[:word:]]‘: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access ‘/home/alpha/bin/[[:word:]]‘: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access ‘/usr/local/sbin/[[:word:]]‘: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access ‘/usr/local/bin/[[:word:]]‘: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access ‘/usr/sbin/[[:word:]]‘: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access ‘/usr/bin/[[:word:]]‘: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access ‘/sbin/[[:word:]]‘: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access ‘/bin/[[:word:]]‘: No such file ordirectory

• ls -d
  List directories. The -d option doesn’t really just list directories. By appending /* to each directory (see below), we will get the contents of the directories.
• $( . ) Perform the commands inside parens and replace the $( . ) with the results for ls to use.
  • $(echo :$PATH | sed -e ‘s|^:|.:|’ -e ‘s|:$|. |’ -e ‘s|:|/[[:word:]]* |g’)
    • Produces a space-separated list of directory patterns like.

    ./[[:word:]]* /home/alpha/bin/[[:word:]]* /usr/local/sbin/[[:word:]]* /usr/local/bin/[[:word:]]* /usr/sbin/[[:word:]]* /usr/bin/[[:word:]]* /sbin/[[:word:]]* /bin/[[:word:]]* 

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    Recursively list all files in a directory including files in symlink directories

    Suppose I have a directory /dir inside which there are 3 symlinks to other directories /dir/dir11 , /dir/dir12 , and /dir/dir13 . I want to list all the files in dir including the ones in dir11 , dir12 and dir13 . To be more generic, I want to list all files including the ones in the directories which are symlinks. find . , ls -R , etc stop at the symlink without navigating into them to list further.

    8 Answers 8

    The -L option to ls will accomplish what you want. It dereferences symbolic links.

    You can also accomplish this with

    The -follow option directs find to follow symbolic links to directories.

    as -follow has been deprecated.

    @pjz: is there a cross-reference for ‘-follow deprecated; use -L’? Somewhat to my considerable surprise, I did find ‘-L’ and ‘-H’ listed in the POSIX / SUS standard at opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/toc.htm, and even more to my surprise no ‘-follow’, so I answered my own question.

    this didn’t work for me. first nothing happened then i tried with -follow — and it said it couln’t find the folder ollow

    Your answer is good, but I want to follow only file paths(full path to file) and not directory path, how can I do it ?

    How about tree? tree -l will follow symlinks.

    Disclaimer: I wrote this package.

    It is a nice interface, but sometimes tree is not available and you cannot add it to the system you are trying to explore.

    find /dir -type f -follow -print 

    -type f means it will display real files (not symlinks)

    -follow means it will follow your directory symlinks

    -print will cause it to display the filenames.

    If you want a ls type display, you can do the following

    find /dir -type f -follow -print|xargs ls -l 

     -L, --dereference when showing file information for a symbolic link, show informa‐ tion for the file the link references rather than for the link itself 

    If you find you want to only follow a few symbolic links (like maybe just the toplevel ones you mentioned), you should look at the -H option, which only follows symlinks that you pass to it on the commandline.

    I knew tree was an appropriate, but I didn’t have tree installed. So, I got a pretty close alternate here

    find -L /var/www/ -type l # man find 

    -L Follow symbolic links. When find examines or prints information about files, the information used shall be taken from the 

    properties of the file to which the link points, not from the link itself (unless it is a broken symbolic link or find is unable to examine the file to which the link points). Use of this option implies -noleaf. If you later use the -P option, -noleaf will still be in effect. If -L is in effect and find discovers a symbolic link to a subdirectory during its search, the subdirectory pointed to by the symbolic link will be searched.

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