Shell – How to list files and directories with directories first

command linelsshell-script

I have two questions. First, which command lists files and directories, but lists directories first?

Second question: I want to copy a list of files into a single directory, but make the target directory the first filename in the command.

Best Answer

Got GNU?

The gnu version of ls has --group-directories-first. And cp has -t.

No GNU?

On systems that don't have gnu's ls, your best bet is two successive calls to find with -maxdepth n/-mindepth n and -type t with the appropriate options.

find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d
find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 \! -type d

For copying files, with the target first, you would have to write a script that saves the first argument, then uses shift, and appends the argument to the end.

#!/bin/sh
target="$1"
shift
cp -r -- "$@" "$target"

Watch Out!

If you were planning on using these together - that is, collecting the list from find or ls (possibly by using xargs) and passing it to cp (or a cp wrapper), you should be aware of what dangers lie in parsing lists of files (basically, filenames can contain characters like newlines that can mess up your script). Specifically, look into find's -exec and -print0 options and xargs's -0 option.

An alternative tool for efficiently copying directory trees.

You might want to look into using rsync instead; it has lots of functionality that might make your job easier.

Related Solutions

Bash – Using find to list all files under certain directory

With -path, you could try:

find ~ -path '*/bin/*' -type f

This won't list bin itself, so to get both:

find ~ \( -path '*/bin/*' -type f \) -o \( -name bin -type d \)

How to show only hidden directories, and then find hidden files separately

To list only hidden files:

ls -ap | grep -v / | egrep "^\."

Note that files here is everything that is not a directory. It's not file in "everything in Linux is a file" ;)

To list only hidden directories:

ls -ap | egrep "^\..*/$"

Comments:

ls -ap lists everything in the current directory, including hidden ones, and puts a / at the end of directories.
grep -v / inverts results of grep /, so that no directory is included.
"^\..*/$" matches everything that start with . and end in /.
If you want to exclude . and .. directories from results of the second part, you can use -A option instead of -a for ls, or if you like to work with regex, you can use "^\.[^.]+/$" instead of "^\..*/$".

Have fun!