Question

I am writing a script in bash on Linux and need to go through all subdirectory names in a given directory. How can I loop through these directories (and skip regular files)?

For example:
the given directory is /tmp/
it has the following subdirectories: /tmp/A, /tmp/B, /tmp/C

I want to retrieve A, B, C.

Answer 1

cd /tmp
find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -printf '%f\n'

A short explanation:

• find finds files (quite obviously)

• . is the current directory, which after the cd is /tmp (IMHO this is more flexible than having /tmp directly in the find command. You have only one place, the cd, to change, if you want more actions to take place in this folder)

• -maxdepth 1 and -mindepth 1 make sure that find only looks in the current directory and doesn’t include . itself in the result

• -type d looks only for directories

• -printf '%f\n prints only the found folder’s name (plus a newline) for each hit.

Et voilà!