Question

I often use the excellent find program in Bash to list files with certain filters. For example, in a Subversion (SVN) working copy, I sometimes wish to recursively list all files but excluding the .svn subdirectories as follows:

find . -name '.svn' -prune -o -type f -print

Today, I wanted to do something similar, but I also wanted to affect the order in which directory contents were listed: I wanted ‘ordinary’ files to be followed by sub-directories (and then the recursive contents). There does not appear to be an option for this.

The ls (list) command has an option to list recursively. This command has many sorting options, including list by file name, access time, size, and so on, but not classification, although the -p option will annotate directories.

Now, I could write, e.g., a Python script to do exactly what I want. However, find already does almost everything I want. Usually within a Bash shell, it is possible to combine programs to do just what you want: each program, like find, sort, uniq, ls, wc, performs a simple task, but does so well. Not every program needs to be able to sort because sort can sort. So, really, I’m just curious…

My question is, do you know if there’s a way to do what I want: to both filter and sort a recursive file listing, just by combining Bash programs?

For example, find gives me the files in this, alphabetical, order:

a.txt
b\file1.txt
b\subdir\file2.txt
b\then_file3.txt
c.txt
d\file4.txt
e.txt

but I’d prefer them in this order, where within each directory, the ordinary files are listed alphabetically first, followed by the directories, again alphabetically:

a.txt
c.txt
e.txt
b\file1.txt
b\then_file3.txt
b\subdir\file2.txt
d\file4.txt

(I am a Windows user, but I run a Bash shell in Cygwin.)

Thanks.

Answer 1

Use an embedded find. The outer find locates all directories and executes an inner find which shows just the files you want in that directory:

find . -type d -exec find {} -type f -maxdepth 1 \;