[SOLVED] How to loop through subdirectories and files in subdirectories then print file names in bash

Issue

Given a root path, I am trying to loop through the sub-directories to loop through the files in each subdirectory and print the names of the files.

The directory structure is like this:

• Root directory

  • dir2,

    • file{1..10}

  • dir3,

    • file{1..10}

  • dir4

    • file{1..10}

I want to loop through dir2 and print all the filenames in it. Then loop through dir3 and print all the file names...and so on

Here is what I have so far:

#!/bin/bash
#!/bin/sh
cd /the/root/directory
for dir in */
do
        for FILE in dir
        do
             echo "$FILE"
        done > /the/root/directory/filenames.txt
done

This is the output I get in filenames.txt:

dir

My expected output is supposed to be:

file{1..10}
file{1..10}
file{1..10}

I am a beginner to bash scripting...well scripting in general. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Solution

You didn't mention what your end goal is, so I'll speculate here.

If your end goal is to only see the files recursively in a list, you can run just a simple find command:

find . -type f

Or if you want to see the details:

find . -type f -ls

A nice way to view them with colors and nice-looking ansi bars is to install the tree command. Example: https://www.tecmint.com/linux-tree-command-examples/

If your needs are simple, for example, you want to do an action such as a tail -n1 on each file, you can pipe the command to xargs like this:

find . -type f | xargs tail -n1

But if your end goal is to use bash to process them in some way, then you can continue down the bash looping method as mentioned by @tjm3772.

---

You mentioned you were just looking for the filenames so you can just run:

find . -type f | sed 's/.*\///'

If you want to write that to a file, just redirect the output to a filename of your choice:

find . -type f | sed 's/.*\///' > filename.txt

Answered By - Dean Householder

Answer Checked By - Mary Flores (WPSolving Volunteer)