255

This is similar to this question, but I want to include the path relative to the current directory in unix. If I do the following:

ls -LR | grep .txt

It doesn't include the full paths. For example, I have the following directory structure:

test1/file.txt
test2/file1.txt
test2/file2.txt

The code above will return:

file.txt
file1.txt
file2.txt

How can I get it to include the paths relative to the current directory using standard Unix commands?

2
  • 8
    This just shows that ls is missing this feature. Commented May 14, 2010 at 6:05
  • 1
    It's a shame all of these solutions require find or tree. I'm ssh'ing into an android device where I appear to only have ls, and none of these other tools :/ Commented Aug 26, 2015 at 5:01

14 Answers 14

348

Use find:

find . -name \*.txt -print

On systems that use GNU find, like most GNU/Linux distributions, you can leave out the -print.

6
  • 13
    ...and for that matter you can leave out the '.'
    – Adam Mitz
    Commented Oct 29, 2008 at 6:01
  • 12
    For absolute paths, use find $(pwd) -name \*.txt
    – Zags
    Commented Sep 17, 2014 at 20:35
  • 3
    If pattern has part of the directory name should use -path "*docs/*.txt" instead of -name. -wholename is same as -path
    – dashesy
    Commented Feb 23, 2016 at 22:05
  • 9
    Use -type f to only return files and not directories, symbolic links, etc.
    – user
    Commented Nov 22, 2016 at 7:11
  • 3
    -name "*.txt" will NOT match file.TXT — always use -iname "*.txt" instead which is case-insensitive.
    – ccpizza
    Commented Jun 24, 2017 at 20:54
79

Use tree, with -f (full path) and -i (no indentation lines):

tree -if --noreport .
tree -if --noreport directory/

You can then use grep to filter out the ones you want.


If the command is not found, you can install it:

Type following command to install tree command on RHEL/CentOS and Fedora linux:

# yum install tree -y

If you are using Debian/Ubuntu, Mint Linux type following command in your terminal:

$ sudo apt-get install tree -y
1
  • 2
    any setting to list only the files, and exclude folders? Commented Mar 26, 2015 at 5:57
28

Try find. You can look it up exactly in the man page, but it's sorta like this:

find [start directory] -name [what to find]

so for your example

find . -name "*.txt"

should give you what you want.

12

You could use find instead:

find . -name '*.txt'
8

To get the actual full path file names of the desired files using the find command, use it with the pwd command:

find $(pwd) -name \*.txt -print
6

That does the trick:

ls -R1 $PWD | while read l; do case $l in *:) d=${l%:};; "") d=;; *) echo "$d/$l";; esac; done | grep -i ".txt"

But it does that by "sinning" with the parsing of ls, though, which is considered bad form by the GNU and Ghostscript communities.

1
  • 2
    @CAFEBABE: it is considered taboo to parse the results of ls because it generally leads to bugs. The sentence in question was trying to call that out. It also had a joke in it that I have removed.
    – Adam Katz
    Commented Mar 15, 2016 at 0:32
4
DIR=your_path
find $DIR | sed 's:""$DIR""::'

'sed' will erase 'your_path' from all 'find' results. And you recieve relative to 'DIR' path.

2
  • this is exactly what i need but it still spits out the full path for me?
    – v3nt
    Commented Mar 15, 2012 at 10:35
  • 1
    don't use the apostrophe's - find /tmp | sed s:"/tmp":: | more Commented Mar 20, 2012 at 0:29
1

Here is a Perl script:

sub format_lines($)
{
    my $refonlines = shift;
    my @lines = @{$refonlines};
    my $tmppath = "-";

    foreach (@lines)
    {
        next if ($_ =~ /^\s+/);
        if ($_ =~ /(^\w+(\/\w*)*):/)
        {
            $tmppath = $1 if defined $1;    
            next;
        }
        print "$tmppath/$_";
    }
}

sub main()
{
        my @lines = ();

    while (<>) 
    {
        push (@lines, $_);
    }
    format_lines(\@lines);
}

main();

usage:

ls -LR | perl format_ls-LR.pl
1
  • This is a terrible Perl program. It's probably 2-3 times as long, and complicated, than it needs to be. Commented Dec 30, 2011 at 3:12
1

You could create a shell function, e.g. in your .zshrc or .bashrc:

filepath() {
    echo $PWD/$1
}

filepath2() {
    for i in $@; do
        echo $PWD/$i
    done
}

The first one would work on single files only, obviously.

1

Find the file called "filename" on your filesystem starting the search from the root directory "/". The "filename"

find / -name "filename" 
1

If you want to preserve the details come with ls like file size etc in your output then this should work.

sed "s|<OLDPATH>|<NEWPATH>|g" input_file > output_file
1

In the fish shell, you can do this to list all pdfs recursively, including the ones in the current directory:

$ ls **pdf

Just remove 'pdf' if you want files of any type.

0

You can implement this functionality like this
Firstly, using the ls command pointed to the targeted directory. Later using find command filter the result from it. From your case, it sounds like - always the filename starts with a word file***.txt

ls /some/path/here | find . -name 'file*.txt'   (* represents some wild card search)
0

In mycase, with tree command

Relative path

tree -ifF ./dir | grep -v '^./dir$' | grep -v '.*/$' | grep '\./.*' | while read file; do
  echo $file
done

Absolute path

tree -ifF ./dir | grep -v '^./dir$' | grep -v '.*/$' | grep '\./.*' | while read file; do
  echo $file | sed -e "s|^.|$PWD|g"
done

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