How to get the list of files in a directory in a shell script?

Question

I\'m trying to get the contents of a directory using shell script.

My script is:

for entry in `ls $search_dir`; do
    echo $entry
done

Answer 1

$ pwd; ls -l
/home/victoria/test
total 12
-rw-r--r-- 1 victoria victoria    0 Apr 23 11:31  a
-rw-r--r-- 1 victoria victoria    0 Apr 23 11:31  b
-rw-r--r-- 1 victoria victoria    0 Apr 23 11:31  c
-rw-r--r-- 1 victoria victoria    0 Apr 23 11:32 'c d'
-rw-r--r-- 1 victoria victoria    0 Apr 23 11:31  d
drwxr-xr-x 2 victoria victoria 4096 Apr 23 11:32  dir_a
drwxr-xr-x 2 victoria victoria 4096 Apr 23 11:32  dir_b
-rw-r--r-- 1 victoria victoria    0 Apr 23 11:32 'e; f'

$ find . -type f
./c
./b
./a
./d
./c d
./e; f

$ find . -type f | sed 's/^\.\///g' | sort
a
b
c
c d
d
e; f

$ find . -type f | sed 's/^\.\///g' | sort > tmp

$ cat tmp
a
b
c
c d
d
e; f

---

Variations

$ pwd
/home/victoria

$ find $(pwd) -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -path '*/\.*' | sort
/home/victoria/new
/home/victoria/new1
/home/victoria/new2
/home/victoria/new3
/home/victoria/new3.md
/home/victoria/new.md
/home/victoria/package.json
/home/victoria/Untitled Document 1
/home/victoria/Untitled Document 2

$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -path '*/\.*' | sed 's/^\.\///g' | sort
new
new1
new2
new3
new3.md
new.md
package.json
Untitled Document 1
Untitled Document 2

Notes:

• . : current folder
• remove -maxdepth 1 to search recursively
• -type f : find files, not directories (d)
• -not -path '*/\.*' : do not return .hidden_files
• sed 's/^\.\///g' : remove the prepended ./ from the result list

Answer 2

find "${search_dir}" "${work_dir}" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} echo "{}"

Answer 3

This is a way to do it where the syntax is simpler for me to understand:

yourfilenames=`ls ./*.txt`
for eachfile in $yourfilenames
do
   echo $eachfile
done

./ is the current working directory but could be replaced with any path
*.txt returns anything.txt
You can check what will be listed easily by typing the ls command straight into the terminal.

Basically, you create a variable yourfilenames containing everything the list command returns as a separate element, and then you loop through it. The loop creates a temporary variable eachfile that contains a single element of the variable it's looping through, in this case a filename. This isn't necessarily better than the other answers, but I find it intuitive because I'm already familiar with the ls command and the for loop syntax.

Answer 4

for entry in "$search_dir"/* "$work_dir"/*
do
  if [ -f "$entry" ];then
    echo "$entry"
  fi
done