Bash – correct way to list the subdirectories of the current directory

bashcommand linedirectoryls

I can find the subdirectories of a directory by

ls -d -- */

ls -l | grep "^d"

but both of these seem indirect, and I would imagine that there would be a standard way to find just the directories. Is there a right way to do this? And if not, will either of these lead to undesirable behavior on edge cases? (Symbolic links, hidden directories, etc.)

Best Answer

The answer will depend more on what you intend to do with the output than on what you are looking for. If you just want to see a list for visual reference at the terminal, your first solution is actually pretty nice. If you want to process the output you should consider using another method.

One of the most robust ways to get a list to feed into another program is to use find.

find -maxdepth 1 -type d

The reason this is good for feeds is that find can output the data separated by nulls using -print0 or properly escape strings as arguments to another programs using -exec. For reference on why this is better than parsing the output of ls, see ParsingLS on Greg's Wiki.

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Linux – What’s the most “correct” mount point for a permanent NTFS partition

First and foremost, this is going to depend solely on your architecture, and customs.

I for instance mount things like this under /mnt. I know people that create top level directories, and people who put this stuff in /home. It all depends on what you're comfortable with. There is no distinct standard on this anymore, the architecture of the system has changed, and you have varying views now, on things that used to be 'gospel'. Things like /usr/local or /opt/share, rpm or source...you get the drift.

Secondly, if you re-read through your link at pathname.com, you'll notice the paragraph under /media that states

Rationale

Historically there have been a number of other different places used to mount removeable media such as /cdrom, /mnt or /mnt/cdrom. Placing the mount points for all removeable media directly in the root directory would potentially result in a large number of extra directories in /. Although the use of subdirectories in /mnt as a mount point has recently been common, it conflicts with a much older tradition of using /mnt directly as a temporary mount point.

So personally, I advocate /mnt/windows or some iteration of that. It keeps the top level dir free, and is simple and intuitive. When I'm looking through or auditing a system, that's where I look for mounts right off the bat.

Shell – List Only Regular Files in Current Directory

With zsh and Glob Qualifiers you can easily express it directly, e.g:

echo *(.)

will either only return the list of regular files or an error depending on your configuration.

For the non-directories:

echo *(^/)

(will include symlinks (including to directories), named pipes, devices, sockets, doors...)

echo *(-.)

for regular files and symlinks to regular files.

echo *(-^/)

for non-directories and no symlinks to directories either.

Also, see the D globbing qualifier if you want to include Dot files (hidden files), like *(D-.).

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Related Solutions

Linux – What’s the most “correct” mount point for a permanent NTFS partition

Shell – List Only Regular Files in Current Directory

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