Get names of all files from a folder with Ruby

Question

I want to get all file names from a folder using Ruby.

Answer 1

In addition to the suggestions in this thread, I wanted to mention that if you need to return dot files as well (.gitignore, etc), with Dir.glob you would need to include a flag as so: Dir.glob("/path/to/dir/*", File::FNM_DOTMATCH) By default, Dir.entries includes dot files, as well as current a parent directories.

For anyone interested, I was curious how the answers here compared to each other in execution time, here was the results against deeply nested hierarchy. The first three results are non-recursive:

       user     system      total        real
Dir[*]: (34900 files stepped over 100 iterations)
  0.110729   0.139060   0.249789 (  0.249961)
Dir.glob(*): (34900 files stepped over 100 iterations)
  0.112104   0.142498   0.254602 (  0.254902)
Dir.entries(): (35600 files stepped over 100 iterations)
  0.142441   0.149306   0.291747 (  0.291998)
Dir[**/*]: (2211600 files stepped over 100 iterations)
  9.399860  15.802976  25.202836 ( 25.250166)
Dir.glob(**/*): (2211600 files stepped over 100 iterations)
  9.335318  15.657782  24.993100 ( 25.006243)
Dir.entries() recursive walk: (2705500 files stepped over 100 iterations)
 14.653018  18.602017  33.255035 ( 33.268056)
Dir.glob(**/*, File::FNM_DOTMATCH): (2705500 files stepped over 100 iterations)
 12.178823  19.577409  31.756232 ( 31.767093)

These were generated with the following benchmarking script:

require 'benchmark'
base_dir = "/path/to/dir/"
n = 100
Benchmark.bm do |x|
  x.report("Dir[*]:") do
    i = 0
    n.times do
      i = i + Dir["#{base_dir}*"].select {|f| !File.directory? f}.length
    end
    puts " (#{i} files stepped over #{n} iterations)"
  end
  x.report("Dir.glob(*):") do
    i = 0
    n.times do
      i = i + Dir.glob("#{base_dir}/*").select {|f| !File.directory? f}.length
    end
    puts " (#{i} files stepped over #{n} iterations)"
  end
  x.report("Dir.entries():") do
    i = 0
    n.times do
      i = i + Dir.entries(base_dir).select {|f| !File.directory? File.join(base_dir, f)}.length
    end
    puts " (#{i} files stepped over #{n} iterations)"
  end
  x.report("Dir[**/*]:") do
    i = 0
    n.times do
      i = i + Dir["#{base_dir}**/*"].select {|f| !File.directory? f}.length
    end
    puts " (#{i} files stepped over #{n} iterations)"
  end
  x.report("Dir.glob(**/*):") do
    i = 0
    n.times do
      i = i + Dir.glob("#{base_dir}**/*").select {|f| !File.directory? f}.length
    end
    puts " (#{i} files stepped over #{n} iterations)"
  end
  x.report("Dir.entries() recursive walk:") do
    i = 0
    n.times do
      def walk_dir(dir, result)
        Dir.entries(dir).each do |file|
          next if file == ".." || file == "."

          path = File.join(dir, file)
          if Dir.exist?(path)
            walk_dir(path, result)
          else
            result << file
          end
        end
      end
      result = Array.new
      walk_dir(base_dir, result)
      i = i + result.length
    end
    puts " (#{i} files stepped over #{n} iterations)"
  end
  x.report("Dir.glob(**/*, File::FNM_DOTMATCH):") do
    i = 0
    n.times do
      i = i + Dir.glob("#{base_dir}**/*", File::FNM_DOTMATCH).select {|f| !File.directory? f}.length
    end
    puts " (#{i} files stepped over #{n} iterations)"
  end
end

The differences in file counts are due to Dir.entries including hidden files by default. Dir.entries ended up taking a bit longer in this case due to needing to rebuild the absolute path of the file to determine if a file was a directory, but even without that it was still taking consistently longer than the other options in the recursive case. This was all using ruby 2.5.1 on OSX.