Find all files in a directory that are not directories themselves

Question

I am looking for a way to list all the files in a directory excluding directories themselves, and the files in those sub-directories.

So if I have:

./test.log
./test2.log
./directory
./directory/file2

I want a command that returns: ./test.log ./test2.log and nothing else.

Dejadeject

Answer 1

If you want test.log, test2.log, and file2 then:

find . -type f

If you do not want file2 then:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f

Hurless

Answer 2

If you need symlinks, pipes, device files and other specific elements of file system to be listed too, you should use:

find -maxdepth 1 -not -type d

This will list everything except directories.

Tallahassee

This is exactly what I was looking for. I wanted to list all types except directories. I was doing something like find / -group xxx | xargs ls -l. This would ls -l <dir> and then ls -l <file> each file in the dir. But using -not -type d excluded dirs from the output. Note that ! -type d also works (and claims to be POSIX compliant per the man page) – Prone

Answer 3

using find is simple as:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f

Noblenobleman

Answer 4

find only regular files

Use the -type f option with find to find only regular files. OR, to be even more-inclusive, use -not -type d to find all file types except directories.

When listing all files, I like to also sort them by piping to sort -V, like this:

# find only regular files
find . -type f | sort -V

# even more-inclusive: find all file types _except_ directories
find . -not -type d | sort -V

From man find:

-type c

File is of type c:

• b - block (buffered) special
• c - character (unbuffered) special
• d - directory
• p - named pipe (FIFO)
• f - regular file
• l - symbolic link; this is never true if the -L option or the -follow option is in effect, unless the symbolic link is broken. If you want to search for symbolic links when -L is in effect, use -xtype.
• s - socket
• D - door (Solaris)

To search for more than one type at once, you can supply the combined list of type letters separated by a comma , (GNU extension).

How to store the output of find (a multi-line string list of files) into a bash array

To take this one step further, here is how to store all filenames into a bash indexed array called filenames_array, so that you can easily pass them to another command:

# obtain a multi-line string of all filenames
filenames="$(find . -type f | sort -V)"
# read the multi-line string into a bash array
IFS=$'\n' read -r -d '' -a filenames_array <<< "$filenames"

# Now, the the variable `filenames_array` is a bash array which contains the list 
# of all files! Each filename is a separate element in the array.

Now you can pass the entire array of filenames to another command, such as echo for example, by using "${filenames_array[@]}" to obtain all elements in the array at once, like this:

echo "${filenames_array[@]}"

OR, you can iterate over each element in the array like this:

echo "Files:"
for filename in "${filenames_array[@]}"; do
    echo "  $filename"
done

Sample output:

Files:
  ./file1.txt
  ./file2.txt
  ./file3.txt

References:

1. I was reminded of find . -type f from the main answer by @John Kugelman here.
2. I borrowed the part to read the multi-line string into a bash array from my own answer here: How to read a multi-line string into a regular bash "indexed" array

Sopping

Answer 5

find . -type f

Thesda

You are right, misread the question. John Kugelman posted a more complete answer. – Thesda

Answer 6

find /some/directory -type f

Shaughnessy

Answer 7

$ find . -type f -print

Each file will be on its own line. You must be in the directory you want to search.

Agnomen

Answer 8

One more option

ls -ltr | grep ^-

to list all files, while

ls -ltr | grep ^d

to list all directories

Geryon