UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Good point methyl, it gives a relative path. For an absolute path one would need to use

Code:

ls -lR "$PWD" | awk -F: '!($0 ~ ORS "d") && $0 ~ ORS "-" {print $1}' RS=

Or some other absolute path to the top directory.

@Scrutinizer
Not the point I was trying to make.
The unix ls -lR does not list the absolute path in the filename field - it shows the directory name as a heading and the directory items listed underneath preceded by a "total" line. A pretty useless format for scripting.

I deduce that on your system ls -lR "${PWD}" is something like the output from:

Code:

find "${PWD}" -print | sort | while read ITEM
do
          ls -lad "${ITEM}"
done

No it also gives the regular ls -lR output, so a directory header (followed by a colon) and total and all the files and subdirectories are only listed with their names, without a path in a ls -l listing. However, I don't find this format that useless, since the output is separated by 2 newlines and so we can use the awk RS= feature and -F: makes sure the directory name is always in $1. We then only need to test if there are no newlines followed by a d (directory) and at least one newline followed by a "-" (file), to find out if $1 needs to be printed...

Just bookmarked this post!

The O/P may not be allowed awk , but otherwise it's brilliant.


Off topic. My post was a quick adaption of a script I wrote for a real-world problem when package software keeled over because a path was too deep. The script started life to find the over-deep paths in a tree of 250,000+ directories. The bottom level of every tree only contains two directories. The original version counted the /'s in all the bottom level directories and output only those which were too deep. Nightmare because it kept changing!

Nice, was this some time ago, since it appears to be written in classic Bourne Shell (when awk was pre-nawk awk)? I was also thinking of involving ls' -a option, but I did not want to open that can of worms, since I presumed that the OP did not require hidden directories to be taken into account....

@Scrutinizer
Yes, my script was written some long time ago. I have accumulated a large number of Shell scripts for on-off and routine jobs since my first encounter with unix (which was indeed pure Bourne Shell). I try to write basicaly portable "open logic" scripts which anybody can follow and tend to ignore Bash extensions in this forum regardless of what I may use in the real world when I need a script to run efficiently.
Btw. I on some releases I have seen awk change to nawk then back to awk over a period of time. We just choose the best one and rename it to awk.

@methyl, o certainly, I also try to write portable (POSIX) code, especially on this forum, and also wrote pre-POSIX Bourne Shell scripts because of maximum portability (I wrote "nice", since I recognized the style) and thus also most of the time ignore bash extensions and with "awk was pre-nawk awk" I tried to refer to the kind of awk, not what it was called on the command line. My remark was only out of interest..