How to go to each directory and execute a command?

Question

How do I write a bash script that goes through each directory inside a parent_directory and executes a command in each directory

Answer 1

You can achieve this by piping and then using xargs. The catch is you need to use the -I flag which will replace the substring in your bash command with the substring passed by each of the xargs.

ls -d */ | xargs -I {} bash -c "cd '{}' && pwd"

You may want to replace pwd with whatever command you want to execute in each directory.

Answer 2

If the toplevel folder is known you can just write something like this:

for dir in `ls $YOUR_TOP_LEVEL_FOLDER`;
do
    for subdir in `ls $YOUR_TOP_LEVEL_FOLDER/$dir`;
    do
      $(PLAY AS MUCH AS YOU WANT);
    done
done

On the $(PLAY AS MUCH AS YOU WANT); you can put as much code as you want.

Note that I didn't "cd" on any directory.

Cheers,

Answer 3

If you're using GNU find, you can try -execdir parameter, e.g.:

find . -type d -execdir realpath "{}" ';'

or (as per @gniourf_gniourf comment):

find . -type d -execdir sh -c 'printf "%s/%s\n" "$PWD" "$0"' {} \;

^{Note: You can use ${0#./} instead of $0 to fix ./ in the front.}

or more practical example:

find . -name .git -type d -execdir git pull -v ';'

---

If you want to include the current directory, it's even simpler by using -exec:

find . -type d -exec sh -c 'cd -P -- "{}" && pwd -P' \;

or using xargs:

find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -L1 sh -c 'cd "$0" && pwd && echo Do stuff'

Or similar example suggested by @gniourf_gniourf:

find . -type d -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do
# ...
done

^{The above examples support directories with spaces in their name.}

---

Or by assigning into bash array:

dirs=($(find . -type d))
for dir in "${dirs[@]}"; do
  cd "$dir"
  echo $PWD
done

^{Change . to your specific folder name. If you don't need to run recursively, you can use: dirs=(*) instead. The above example doesn't support directories with spaces in the name.}

So as @gniourf_gniourf suggested, the only proper way to put the output of find in an array without using an explicit loop will be available in Bash 4.4 with:

mapfile -t -d '' dirs < <(find . -type d -print0)

---

Or not a recommended way (which involves parsing of ls):

ls -d */ | awk '{print $NF}' | xargs -n1 sh -c 'cd $0 && pwd && echo Do stuff'

^{The above example would ignore the current dir (as requested by OP), but it'll break on names with the spaces.}

See also:

• Bash: for each directory at SO
• How to enter every directory in current path and execute script? at SE Ubuntu

Answer 4

you can use

find .

to search all files/dirs in the current directory recurive

Than you can pipe the output the xargs command like so

find . | xargs 'command here'