Is there a way to use shell globbing to identify nested directories?
so if I have dir/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/.. and I have files under all of them, what is the equival
In Bash 4, with shopt -s globstar
, and zsh you can use **/*
which will include everything except hidden files. You can do shopt -s dotglob
in Bash 4 or setopt dotglob
in zsh to cause hidden files to be included.
In ksh, set -o globstar
enables it. I don't think there's a way to include dot files implicitly, but I think **/{.[^.],}*
works.
You may try:
**/*.*
However it'll ignore hidden files (such as .git
files). Sometimes it's a life-saver.
Read more at: What expands to all files in current directory recursively? at SO
If you want to act on all the files returned by find, rather than just list them, you can pipe them to xargs:
find <directory> -type f | xargs ls
But this is only for commands that don't have a recursive flag.
There is no way to do this with vanilla Bash, however most commands accept a -R
or --recursive
option to tell them to descend into directories.
If you simply want to list all files located anywhere within a directory or its sub-directories, you can use find.
To recursively find files (-type f
) with a given directory:
find <directory> -type f
Specifically about git (gitignore, gitattributes, and commands that take filenames): if the pattern contains no slash, *
wildcards will match deep. If it does contain a slash, git will call fnmatch with the FNM_PATHNAME flag, and simple wildcards won't match slashes. **
to match deep isn't supported. Maybe this kind of deep matching could be more widely supported with a new FNM_STARSTAR
flag, and an implementation in glibc, gnulib and other places.
You can use tree, it will show all folders recursively.
tree <path>