Question

I am writing a shell script that takes file paths as input.

For this reason, I need to generate recursive file listings with full paths. For example, the file bar has the path:

/home/ken/foo/bar 

but, as far as I can see, both ls and find only give relative path listings:

./foo/bar   (from the folder ken) 

It seems like an obvious requirement, but I can’t see anything in the find or ls man pages.

How can I generate a list of files in the shell including their absolute paths?

Answer 1

If you give find an absolute path to start with, it will print absolute paths. For instance, to find all .htaccess files in the current directory:

find "$(pwd)" -name .htaccess 

or if your shell expands $PWD to the current directory:

find "$PWD" -name .htaccess 

find simply prepends the path it was given to a relative path to the file from that path.

Greg Hewgill also suggested using pwd -P if you want to resolve symlinks in your current directory.