CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashshell
Clara
Clara

Reputation: 31

Nested for loop in bash not iterating properly?

I am new to scripting/programming/everything and can't seem to figure out this bash script/loop I am trying to iterate.

I have a directory called "folder", in which there are many subdirectories which each contain files that I would like to echo (for now)

I have this, but it doesn't seem to print the files within the subdirectories but instead prints the subdirectories themselves. How would I alter the script to make this work? 

for directory in *;
do
        for thing in $directory 
        do
                echo $thing
        done
done

Upvotes: 0

Views: 425

Answers (2)

sjsam
sjsam

Reputation: 21955

Bash version 4.0 adds a new globbing option called globstar which treats the pattern ** differently when it's set.

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s globstar
for file in folder/** # with '**'  bash recurses all the directories
do
  echo "$file"
done

Upvotes: 1

chepner
chepner

Reputation: 530920

The for loop itself doesn't traverse a file system; it only iterates over a sequence of strings. You need to iterate over the result of a pathname expansion for the second loop.

for directory in *;
do
    for thing in "$directory"/*
    do
        echo "$thing"
    done
done

You can do this with one loop with a more complex pattern:

for thing in */*; do
    echo "$thing"
done

Upvotes: 3

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