How to list just directories in bash
This morning, I was trying to find a way to list just the subdirectories in the current directory, in a bash shell script I was writing. I thought it would be simple, but everything I tried seemed to either take an extraordinarily long time, or felt like an ugly hack.
The first thing I tried was:
find . -type d
But this was extremely slow, because it was recursively searching inside every subdirectory as well. I just wanted a list of subdirectories inside the current directory. I won’t bore you/clutter this post up with any more of my less-than-ideal methods.
What follows are a couple of ways of doing what I was trying to do, which I found in a post (and its comments) on the Ubuntu Blog, “List only the directories“:
ls -l | grep “^d”
This works, but gives a ‘long’ directory listing, when all I wanted was a list of directory names.
find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1This one was my favorite, since it used the method I originally tried, but it fixed the slowness by using parameters to avoid recursion. It gave me a couple warnings about the order of the parameters, though, so I changed it to this:
find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d
ls -d */This gave me the same output as the ‘find’ method did, but some timing tests showed me that the ‘find’ method was about 2 times faster.
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