Listing only directories using ls in bash: An examination

Question

This command lists directories in the current path: ls -d */

What exactly does the pattern */ do?

And how can we give the absolute path in the above command (e.g. ls -d /home/alice/Documents) for listing only directories in that path?

Answer 1

*/ is a pattern that matches all of the subdirectories in the current directory (* would match all files and subdirectories; the / restricts it to directories). Similarly, to list all subdirectories under /home/alice/Documents, use ls -d /home/alice/Documents/*/

Answer 2

Four ways to get this done, each with a different output format

1. Using echo

Example: echo */, echo */*/
Here is what I got:

cs/ draft/ files/ hacks/ masters/ static/  
cs/code/ files/images/ static/images/ static/stylesheets/  

2. Using ls only

Example: ls -d */
Here is exactly what I got:

cs/     files/      masters/  
draft/  hacks/      static/  

Or as list (with detail info): ls -dl */

3. Using ls and grep

Example: ls -l | grep "^d" Here is what I got:

drwxr-xr-x  24 h  staff     816 Jun  8 10:55 cs  
drwxr-xr-x   6 h  staff     204 Jun  8 10:55 draft  
drwxr-xr-x   9 h  staff     306 Jun  8 10:55 files  
drwxr-xr-x   2 h  staff      68 Jun  9 13:19 hacks  
drwxr-xr-x   6 h  staff     204 Jun  8 10:55 masters  
drwxr-xr-x   4 h  staff     136 Jun  8 10:55 static  

4. Bash Script (Not recommended for filename containing spaces)

Example: for i in $(ls -d */); do echo ${i%%/}; done
Here is what I got:

cs  
draft  
files  
hacks  
masters  
static

If you like to have '/' as ending character, the command will be: for i in $(ls -d */); do echo ${i}; done

cs/  
draft/  
files/  
hacks/  
masters/  
static/

Answer 3

I use:

ls -d */ | cut -f1 -d'/'

This creates a single column with no trailing slash - useful in scripts.

My two cents.

Answer 4

For all folders without subfolders:

find /home/alice/Documents -maxdepth 1 -type d

For all folders with subfolders:

find /home/alice/Documents -type d

Answer 5

4 (more) Reliable Options.

An unquoted asterisk * will be interpreted as a pattern (glob) by the shell.
The shell will use it in pathname expansion.
It will then generate a list of filenames that match the pattern.
A simple asterisk will match all filenames in the PWD (present working directory).
A more complex pattern as */ will match all filenames that end in /.
Thus, all directories. That is why the command:

1.- echo.

echo */
echo ./*/              ### avoid misinterpreting filenames like "-e dir"

will be expanded (by the shell) to echo all directories in the PWD.

---

To test this: Create a directory (mkdir) named like test-dir, and cd into it:

mkdir test-dir; cd test-dir

Create some directories:

mkdir {cs,files,masters,draft,static}   # safe directories.
mkdir {*,-,--,-v\ var,-h,-n,dir\ with\ spaces}  # some a bit less secure.
touch -- 'file with spaces' '-a' '-l' 'filename'    # and some files:

---

The command echo ./*/ will remain reliable even with odd named files:

./--/ ./-/ ./*/ ./cs/ ./dir with spaces/ ./draft/ ./files/ ./-h/
./masters/ ./-n/ ./static/ ./-v var/

But the spaces in filenames make reading a bit confusing.

---

If instead of echo, we use ls, the shell is still what is expanding the list of filenames. The shell is the reason to get a list of directories in the PWD. The -d option to ls makes it list the present directory entry instead of the contents of each directory (as presented by default).

ls -d */

However, this command is (somewhat) less reliable. It will fail with the odd named files listed above. It will choke with several names. You need to erase one by one till you find the ones with problems.

2.- ls

The GNU ls will accept the "end of options" (--) key.

ls -d ./*/                     ### more reliable BSD ls
ls -d -- */                    ### more reliable GNU ls

3.-printf

To list each directory in its own line (in one column, similar to ls -1), use:

$ printf "%s\n" */        ### Correct even with "-", spaces or newlines.

And, even better, we could remove the trailing /:

$ set -- */; printf "%s\n" "${@%/}"        ### Correct with spaces and newlines.

An attempt like this:

$ for i in $(ls -d */); do echo ${i%%/}; done

Will fail on:

• some names (ls -d */) as already shown above.
• will be affected by the value of IFS.
• will split names on spaces and tabs (with default IFS).
• each newline in the name will start a new echo command.

4.- Function

Finally, using the argument list inside a function will not affect the arguments list of the present running shell. Simply:

$ listdirs(){ set -- */; printf "%s\n" "${@%/}"; }
$ listdirs

presents this list:

--
-
*
cs
dir with spaces
draft
files
-h
masters
-n
static
-v var

This options are safe with several types of odd filenames.

Answer 6

The tree command is also pretty useful here. By default it will show all files and directories to a complete depth, with some ascii characters showing the directory tree.

$ tree
.
├── config.dat
├── data
│   ├── data1.bin
│   ├── data2.inf
│   └── sql
|   │   └── data3.sql
├── images
│   ├── background.jpg
│   ├── icon.gif
│   └── logo.jpg
├── program.exe
└── readme.txt

But if we wanted to get just the directories, without the ascii tree, and with the full path from the current directory, you could do:

$ tree -dfi
.
./data
./data/sql
./images

The arguments being:

-d     List directories only.
-f     Prints the full path prefix for each file.
-i     Makes tree not print the indentation lines, useful when used in conjunction with the -f option.

And if you then want the absolute path, you could start by specifying the full path to the current directory:

$ tree -dfi "$(pwd)"
/home/alice/Documents
/home/alice/Documents/data
/home/alice/Documents/data/sql
/home/alice/Documents/images

And to limit the number of subdirectories, you can set the max level of subdirectories with -L level, eg:

$ tree -dfi -L 1 "$(pwd)"
/home/alice/Documents
/home/alice/Documents/data
/home/alice/Documents/images

More arguments can be seen with man tree

Answer 7

In case you're wondering why output from 'ls -d */' gives you two trailing slashes, like:

[prompt]$ ls -d */    
app//  cgi-bin//  lib//        pub//

it's probably because somewhere your shell or session config files alias the ls command to a version of ls that includes the -F flag. That flag appends a character to each output name (that's not a plain file) indicating the kind of thing it is. So one slash is the from matching the pattern '*/', and the other slash is the appended type indicator.

To get rid of this issue, you could of course define a different alias for ls. However, to temporarily not invoke the alias, you can prepend the command with backslash:

\ls -d */

Answer 8

I just add this to my .bashrc file (you could also just type it on the command line if you only need/want it for one session)

alias lsd='ls -ld */'

then lsd will produce the desired result.

Answer 9

If hidden directory is not needed to be listed, I offer:

ls -l | grep "^d" | awk -F" " '{print $9}'  

And if hidden directories is needed to be listed, use:

ls -Al | grep "^d" | awk -F" " '{print $9}'

OR

find -maxdepth 1 -type d | awk -F"./" '{print $2}'

Answer 10

to show folder lists without /

ls -d */|sed 's|[/]||g'

Answer 11

Actual ls solution, including symlinks to directories

Many answers here don't actually use ls (or only use it in the trivial sense of ls -d, while using wildcards for the actual subdirectory matching. A true ls solution is useful, since it allows the use of ls options for sorting order, etc.

Excluding symlinks

One solution using ls has been given, but it does something different from the other solutions in that it excludes symlinks to directories:

ls -l | grep '^d'

(possibly piping through sed or awk to isolate the file names)

Including symlinks

In the (probably more common) case that symlinks to directories should be included, we can use the -p option of ls, which makes it append a slash character to names of directories (including symlinked ones):

ls -1p | grep '/$'

or, getting rid of the trailing slashes:

ls -1p | grep '/$' | sed 's/\/$//'

We can add options to ls as needed (if a long listing is used, the -1 is no longer required).

note: if we want trailing slashes, but don't want them highlighted by grep, we can hackishly remove the highlighting by making the actual matched portion of the line empty:

ls -1p | grep -P '(?=/$)'

Answer 12

For listing only directories:

ls -l | grep ^d

for listing only files:

ls -l | grep -v ^d 

or also you can do as: ls -ld */

Answer 13

Here is what I am using

ls -d1 /Directory/Path/*;

Answer 14

Test whether the item is a directory with test -d:

for i in $(ls); do test -d $i && echo $i ; done

Answer 15

One-liner to list directories only from "here".

With file count.

for i in `ls -d */`; do g=`find ./$i -type f -print| wc -l`; echo "Directory $i contains $g files."; done

Answer 16

*/ is a filename matching pattern that matches directories in the current directory.

To list directories only, I like this function:

# long list only directories
llod () { 
  ls -l --color=always "$@" | grep --color=never '^d'
}

Put it in your .bashrc.

Usage examples:

llod       # long listing of all directories in current directory
llod -tr   # same but in chronological order oldest first
llod -d a* # limit to directories beginning with letter 'a'
llod -d .* # limit to hidden directories

NOTE: it will break if you use the -i option. Here is a fix for that:

# long list only directories
llod () { 
  ls -l --color=always "$@" | egrep --color=never '^d|^[[:digit:]]+ d'
}

Answer 17

FYI, if you want to print all the files in multi-line, you can do a ls -1 which will print each file in a separate line. file1 file2 file3

Answer 18

Using Perl:

ls | perl -nle 'print if -d;'

Answer 19

A plain list of the current directory, it'd be:

ls -1d ./*/

Do you want it sorted and clean?

ls -1d ./*/ | cut -c 3- | rev | cut -c 2- | rev | sort

Remember: capitalized characters have different behavior in the sort

Answer 20

I partially solved with :

cd "/path/to/pricipal/folder"

for i in $(ls -d .*/); do sudo ln -s "$PWD"/${i%%/} /home/inukaze/${i%%/}; done

ln: «/home/inukaze/./.»: can't overwrite a directory
ln: «/home/inukaze/../..»: can't overwrite a directory
ln: accesing to «/home/inukaze/.config»: too much symbolics links levels
ln: accesing to «/home/inukaze/.disruptive»: too much symbolics links levels
ln: accesing to «/home/inukaze/innovations»: too much symbolics links levels
ln: accesing to «/home/inukaze/sarl»: too much symbolics links levels
ln: accesing to «/home/inukaze/.e_old»: too much symbolics links levels
ln: accesing to «/home/inukaze/.gnome2_private»: too much symbolics links levels
ln: accesing to «/home/inukaze/.gvfs»: too much symbolics links levels
ln: accesing to «/home/inukaze/.kde»: too much symbolics links levels
ln: accesing to «/home/inukaze/.local»: too much symbolics links levels
ln: accesing to «/home/inukaze/.xVideoServiceThief»: too much symbolics links levels

Well , this reduce to me , the mayor part :)

Answer 21

Adding on to make it full circle, to retrieve the path of every folder, use a combination of Albert's answer as well as Gordans that should be pretty usefull.

for i in $(ls -d /pathto/parent/folder/*/); do echo ${i%%/}; done

Output:

/pathto/parent/folder/childfolder1/
/pathto/parent/folder/childfolder2/
/pathto/parent/folder/childfolder3/
/pathto/parent/folder/childfolder4/
/pathto/parent/folder/childfolder5/
/pathto/parent/folder/childfolder6/
/pathto/parent/folder/childfolder7/
/pathto/parent/folder/childfolder8/

Answer 22

Try this one. this will work on all distros ls -ltr | grep drw

Answer 23

To answer the original question, */ has nothing to do with ls per se; it is done by the shell/Bash, in a process known as globbing.

This is why echo */ and ls -d */ output the same elements. (The -d flag makes ls output the directory names and not contents of the directories.)

Answer 24

file *|grep directory

O/P (On my machine) --

[root@rhel6 ~]# file *|grep directory
mongo-example-master:    directory
nostarch:                directory
scriptzz:                directory
splunk:                  directory
testdir:                 directory

Above output can be refined more by using cut .

file *|grep directory|cut -d':' -f1
mongo-example-master
nostarch
scriptzz
splunk
testdir

* could be replaced with any path that's permitted
 file - determine file type
 grep - searches for string named directory
 -d - to specify a field delimiter
 -f1 - denotes field 1

Answer 25

Here is what I use for listing only directory names:

ls -1d /some/folder/*/ | awk -F "/" "{print \$(NF-1)}"