recursive searching for files in directory that matches a particular name

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting recursive searching for files in directory that matches a particular name - taking care of links Post 302413545 by methyl on Friday 16th of April 2010 05:17:03 AM

04-16-2010

Registered User

Hi vickylife. I tried your recursion approach but could not make it work for a tree of any size because my shell collapsed due due to nesting loops too deep.

Just for interest tried another approach to navigating the directory tree using just "ls" and Shell commands. The script looks at the start directory and then looks for directories. If it finds any directories it stores the list in a file. Next time round it reads the list from the previous iteration and repeats the process.
The script looks long but you will see that half the script is concerned with tidying up workfiles.
The output is a list of all the directories from the start directory down.

It is relatively trivial to adapt the script to take parameters and to record files of a particular name into an output file, but I'll leave that bit to you. If you are non-root you may need to test for read access to each directory.

I couldn't make out whether you wanted to follow links or not. If you do, the "ls" needs a "-L" switch.

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
PN="`basename $0`"
#
WORKFILE1=/var/tmp/${PN}.wf1.$$
WORKFILE2=/var/tmp/${PN}.wf2.$$
#
MYEXIT ()
{
if [ -f "${WORKFILE1}" ]
then
        rm "${WORKFILE1}"
fi
if [ -f "${WORKFILE2}" ]
then
        rm "${WORKFILE2}"
fi
#
exit
}
#
trap 'MYEXIT' 1 2 3 15
#
# Seed process with current directory
pwd > ${WORKFILE1}
#
while true
do
        > ${WORKFILE2}
        cat ${WORKFILE1}|while read DIR
        do
                cd "${DIR}"
                pwd             # Output to screen
                # Find any subdirectories. Allow for none
                ls -1d * 2>/dev/null | while read DIR2
                do
                        if [ -d "${DIR2}" ]
                        then
                                cd "${DIR2}"
                                pwd >> ${WORKFILE2}
                                cd ..
                        fi
                done
        done
        # If no more subdirectories we have finished
        if [ -s ${WORKFILE2} ]
        then
                # Seed next iteration
                cp -p ${WORKFILE2} ${WORKFILE1}
        else
                break
        fi
done
#
MYEXIT

Footnote: Also looked at "ls -laR" approach by felt that processing the output really needed "awk" which would defeat the object because we would then be tempted to do the whole process in "awk". The output format of "ls -1R" is similarly awkward to process.

Last edited by methyl; 04-16-2010 at 06:44 AM.. Reason: Footnote:

methyl

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LEARN ABOUT CENTOS

platform::shell

platform::shell(n)					       Tcl Bundled Packages						platform::shell(n)

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

NAME

       platform::shell - System identification support code and utilities

SYNOPSIS

       package require platform::shell ?1.1.4?

       platform::shell::generic shell
       platform::shell::identify shell
       platform::shell::platform shell
_________________________________________________________________

DESCRIPTION

       The platform::shell package provides several utility commands useful for the identification of the architecture of a specific Tcl shell.

       This  package  allows the identification of the architecture of a specific Tcl shell different from the shell running the package. The only
       requirement is that the other shell (identified by its path), is actually executable on the current machine.

       While for most platform this means that the architecture of the interrogated shell is identical to the architecture of  the  running  shell
       this  is  not generally true. A counter example are all platforms which have 32 and 64 bit variants and where a 64bit system is able to run
       32bit code. For these running and interrogated shell may have different 32/64 bit settings and thus different identifiers.

       For applications like a code repository it is important to identify the architecture of the shell which will  actually  run  the  installed
       packages, versus the architecture of the shell running the repository software.

COMMANDS

       platform::shell::identify shell
	      This command does the same identification as platform::identify, for the specified Tcl shell, in contrast to the running shell.

       platform::shell::generic shell
	      This command does the same identification as platform::generic, for the specified Tcl shell, in contrast to the running shell.

       platform::shell::platform shell
	      This command returns the contents of tcl_platform(platform) for the specified Tcl shell.

KEYWORDS

       operating system, cpu architecture, platform, architecture

platform::shell 						       1.1.4							platform::shell(n)