Linux – List all directories and subdirectories, excluding directories without files

command linedirectory-listinglinuxlsunix

I would like to list all the directories and sub directories in and below the current path. Since I only wanted to display directories I came up with the following command:

find -type d -exec ls -d1 {} \; | cut -c 3-

This prints out for example

webphone
music
finance
finance/banking
finance/realestate
finance/trading
finance/other
finance/moneylending
finance/insurance
webradio
webtv

The problem I have right now is, that the directory finance is listed. finance contains no files, just the sub directories you see above. What I want to achieve is the following output:

webphone
music
finance/banking
finance/realestate
finance/trading
finance/other
finance/moneylending
finance/insurance
webradio
webtv

In this list the directory finance is not listed. Therefore I need your advice of how to filter directories which contain no files (only subdirectories).

Best Answer

Here's one way: list all regular files, strip away the file basenames, and remove duplicates.

find . -type f | sed 's!/[^/]*$!!' | sort -u

If you want to strip the leading ./:

find . -type f | sed -e 's!/[^/]*$!!' -e 's!^\./!!' | sort -u

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Linux – How to get a linux directory listing for files beginning with a certain letter that doesn’t descend into subdirectories

Ah, I just found it on the 6th reading of the man page. It's the not-so-sensibly named "directory" parameter

ls -d d*

Linux – Find directories with all files inside older than X

It's probably possible to do this without creating files using process substitution or something, but here's a quick-and-dirty solution:

find . -type f -mtime +30 -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq > old.txt
find . -type f -mtime -30 -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq > new.txt
grep -vf new.txt old.txt

The first command outputs the path of every file modified more than 30 days ago (in find's -printf -- at least with the GNU find on my system -- %h prints the whole path except for the actual filename), then sorts those and gets rid of any duplicates, and puts the whole thing into a file called old.txt.

The second command does the same but with every file modified less than 30 days ago, and puts them into another file, new.txt.

The grep line prints every line from old.txt that doesn't appear in new.txt -- so it will give you a list of directories that contain only files that were last modified more than 30 days ago.

This is all using the GNU versions of the utilities. I don't know if the syntax matches up on the BSD versions, etc.

Best Answer

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Linux – How to get a linux directory listing for files beginning with a certain letter that doesn’t descend into subdirectories

Linux – Find directories with all files inside older than X

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