Get names of all files from a folder with Ruby

Question

I want to get all file names from a folder using Ruby.

Answer 1

In an IRB context, you can use the following to get the files in the current directory:

file_names = `ls`.split("\n")

You can make this work on other directories too:

file_names = `ls ~/Documents`.split("\n")

Answer 2

Personally, I found this the most useful for looping over files in a folder, forward looking safety:

Dir['/etc/path/*'].each do |file_name|
  next if File.directory? file_name 
end

Answer 3

Dir.new('/home/user/foldername').each { |file| puts file }

Answer 4

If you want get an array of filenames including symlinks, use

Dir.new('/path/to/dir').entries.reject { |f| File.directory? f }

or even

Dir.new('/path/to/dir').reject { |f| File.directory? f }

and if you want to go without symlinks, use

Dir.new('/path/to/dir').select { |f| File.file? f }

As shown in other answers, use Dir.glob('/path/to/dir/**/*') instead of Dir.new('/path/to/dir') if you want to get all the files recursively.

Answer 5

One simple way could be:

dir = './' # desired directory
files = Dir.glob(File.join(dir, '**', '*')).select{|file| File.file?(file)}

files.each do |f|
    puts f
end

Answer 6

In Ruby 2.5 you can now use Dir.children. It gets filenames as an array except for "." and ".."

Example:

Dir.children("testdir")   #=> ["config.h", "main.rb"]

http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.5.0/Dir.html#method-c-children