I am writing a shell script that takes file paths as input.
For this reason, I need to generate recursive file listings with full paths. For example, the file bar
has the path:
/home/ken/foo/bar
but, as far as I can see, both ls
and find
only give relative path listings:
./foo/bar (from the folder ken)
It seems like an obvious requirement, but I can't see anything in the find
or ls
man pages.
How can I generate a list of files in the shell including their absolute paths?
find /home/ken/foo/bar -exec ls -ld $PWD/{} \;
If you give find
an absolute path to start with, it will print absolute paths. For instance, to find all .htaccess files in the current directory:
find "$(pwd)" -name .htaccess
or if your shell expands $PWD
to the current directory:
find "$PWD" -name .htaccess
find
simply prepends the path it was given to a relative path to the file from that path.
Greg Hewgill also suggested using pwd -P
if you want to resolve symlinks in your current directory.
readlink -f filename
gives the full absolute path. but if the file is a symlink, u'll get the final resolved name.
realpath
instead
brew install coreutils
, then the executable will be installed as /usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin/readlink
Use this for dirs (the /
after **
is needed in bash to limit it to directories):
ls -d -1 "$PWD/"**/
this for files and directories directly under the current directory, whose names contain a .
:
ls -d -1 "$PWD/"*.*
this for everything:
ls -d -1 "$PWD/"**/*
Taken from here http://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2002/msg00033.html
In bash, **
is recursive if you enable shopt -s globstar
.
You can use
find $PWD
in bash
ls -d "$PWD/"*
This looks only in the current directory. It quotes "$PWD" in case it contains spaces.
Command: ls -1 -d "$PWD/"*
This will give the absolute paths of the file like below.
[root@kubenode1 ssl]# ls -1 -d "$PWD/"*
/etc/kubernetes/folder/file-test-config.txt
/etc/kubernetes/folder/file-test.txt
/etc/kubernetes/folder/file-client.txt
The $PWD
is a good option by Matthew above. If you want find to only print files then you can also add the -type f option to search only normal files. Other options are "d" for directories only etc. So in your case it would be (if i want to search only for files with .c ext):
find $PWD -type f -name "*.c"
or if you want all files:
find $PWD -type f
Note: You can't make an alias for the above command, because $PWD gets auto-completed to your home directory when the alias is being set by bash.
You can do
ls -1 |xargs realpath
If you need to specify an absolute path or relative path You can do that as well
ls -1 $FILEPATH |xargs realpath
Try this:
find "$PWD"/
You get list of absolute paths in working directory.
If you give the find command an absolute path, it will spit the results out with an absolute path. So, from the Ken directory if you were to type:
find /home/ken/foo/ -name bar -print
(instead of the relative path find . -name bar -print
)
You should get:
/home/ken/foo/bar
Therefore, if you want an ls -l
and have it return the absolute path, you can just tell the find command to execute an ls -l
on whatever it finds.
find /home/ken/foo -name bar -exec ls -l {} ;\
NOTE: There is a space between {}
and ;
You'll get something like this:
-rw-r--r-- 1 ken admin 181 Jan 27 15:49 /home/ken/foo/bar
If you aren't sure where the file is, you can always change the search location. As long as the search path starts with "/", you will get an absolute path in return. If you are searching a location (like /) where you are going to get a lot of permission denied errors, then I would recommend redirecting standard error so you can actually see the find results:
find / -name bar -exec ls -l {} ;\ 2> /dev/null
(2>
is the syntax for the Borne and Bash shells, but will not work with the C shell. It may work in other shells too, but I only know for sure that it works in Bourne and Bash).
ls
process with -exec ls -ld {} +
. (You probably want -d
to not have ls
list directory contents). Or better, use find's built-in ls
with find ... name bar -ls
. Also, you have the syntax wrong for one arg per command: you have to quote the semicolon from the shell, so it's {} \;
.
fd
Using fd
(alternative to find
), use the following syntax:
fd . foo -a
Where .
is the search pattern and foo
is the root directory.
E.g. to list all files in etc
recursively, run: fd . /etc -a
.
-a, --absolute-path Show absolute instead of relative paths
Just an alternative to
ls -d "$PWD/"*
to pinpoint that *
is shell expansion, so
echo "$PWD/"*
would do the same (the drawback you cannot use -1
to separate by new lines, not spaces).
-1
to separete by lines?
If you need list of all files in current as well as sub-directories
find $PWD -type f
If you need list of all files only in current directory
find $PWD -maxdepth 1 -type f
find jar file recursely and print absolute path
`ls -R |grep "\.jar$" | xargs readlink -f`
/opt/tool/dev/maven_repo/com/oracle/ojdbc/ojdbc8-19.3.0.0.jar
/opt/tool/dev/maven_repo/com/oracle/ojdbc/ons-19.3.0.0.jar
/opt/tool/dev/maven_repo/com/oracle/ojdbc/oraclepki-19.3.0.0.jar
/opt/tool/dev/maven_repo/com/oracle/ojdbc/osdt_cert-19.3.0.0.jar
/opt/tool/dev/maven_repo/com/oracle/ojdbc/osdt_core-19.3.0.0.jar
/opt/tool/dev/maven_repo/com/oracle/ojdbc/simplefan-19.3.0.0.jar
/opt/tool/dev/maven_repo/com/oracle/ojdbc/ucp-19.3.0.0.jar
lspwd() { for i in $@; do ls -d -1 $PWD/$i; done }
Here's an example that prints out a list without an extra period and that also demonstrates how to search for a file match. Hope this helps:
find . -type f -name "extr*" -exec echo `pwd`/{} \; | sed "s|\./||"
This worked for me. But it didn't list in alphabetical order.
find "$(pwd)" -maxdepth 1
This command lists alphabetically as well as lists hidden files too.
ls -d -1 "$PWD/".*; ls -d -1 "$PWD/"*;
stat
Absolute path of a single file:
stat -c %n "$PWD"/foo/bar
You might want to try this.
for name in /home/ken/foo/bar/*
do
echo $name
done
You can get abs path using for
loop and echo
simply without find
.
Most if not all of the suggested methods result in paths that cannot be used directly in some other terminal command if the path contains spaces. Ideally the results will have slashes prepended. This works for me on macOS:
find / -iname "*SEARCH TERM spaces are okay*" -print 2>&1 | grep -v denied |grep -v permitted |sed -E 's/\ /\\ /g'
This works best if you want a dynamic solution that works well in a function
lfp ()
{
ls -1 $1 | xargs -I{} echo $(realpath $1)/{}
}
This will give the canonical path (will resolve symlinks): realpath FILENAME
If you want canonical path to the symlink itself, then: realpath -s FILENAME
Recursive files can be listed by many ways in Linux. Here I am sharing one liner script to clear all logs of files(only files) from /var/log/
directory and second check recently which logs file has made an entry.
First:
find /var/log/ -type f #listing file recursively
Second:
for i in $(find $PWD -type f) ; do cat /dev/null > "$i" ; done #empty files recursively
Third use:
ls -ltr $(find /var/log/ -type f ) # listing file used in recent
Note: for directory location you can also pass $PWD
instead of /var/log
.
If you don't have symbolic links, you could try
tree -iFL 1 [DIR]
-i
makes tree print filenames in each line, without the tree structure.
-f
makes tree print the full path of each file.
-L 1
avoids tree from recursion.
Write one small function
lsf() {
ls `pwd`/$1
}
Then you can use like
lsf test.sh
it gives full path like
/home/testuser/Downloads/test.sh
find / -print
will do this
ls -1 | awk -vpath=$PWD/ '{print path$1}'
Success story sharing
pwd -P
.ls -d -1 $PWD/**/*
but I guessfind $PWD
also works (tested in bash)find $PWD
is simple. Thels
incantation is complex and unwieldy (unless you alias it).find
is not dependent on shell glob expansions, so will work in any shell.find
is also a lot more flexible, I can get a recursive listing of all files, or perhaps of all directories, or maybe I want a listing of all xml files, or all files changed in the last week. All that is possible withfind
, but not easily withls
.find "`pwd`" -name .htaccess
because of spaces in directory names