Question

I want to write a shell script that loops through all directories under a directory, and call a java program with the directory name as an argument at each iteration.

So my parent directory is provided as an argument to the shell script: eg:

. myShell.sh  /myFolder/myDirectory

There are 100 directories under /myFolder/myDirectory. For each “directory_i”, i want to run:

java myProg directory_i

If someone can provide me with a working shell script that’ll be perfect!

Answer 1

You could use find.

The myShell.sh script might look a bit like this, this is a version that will recursively process any and all subdirectories under your target.

DIR="$1"
find "$DIR" -type d -exec java myProg {} \;

The exact set of find options available depends on your variety of unix. If you don’t want recursion, you may be able to use -maxdepth as Neeraj noted, or perhaps -prune, which starts get a bit ugly:

find "$DIR" \( ! -name . -prune \) -type d  -exec java myProg {} \;

EDIT: Added prune example.