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Bribles
Asked: 2010-03-27 13:34:13 +0800 CST

What's a simple way to list the immediate subdirectories of a given location?

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Is there a built-in command or a less verbose way of achieving this?

find /var/foo -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d

Or should I just make a tiny shell script or function if I'm doing this sort of thing often?

linux filesystems command-line-interface find

2 Answers

  1. ls -d */

    "-d" means don't delve into the directories, the "*/" only matches directories.

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  2. Best Answer

    The shortest command seems to be

    ls -d /var/foo/{*,.[^.]*,..[^.]*}/

    I believe that will non-recursively list all the subdirectories of /var/foo, no matter how stupidly named the directories are or if non-ASCII characters are involved.

    user@comp:~$ ls -1d /var/foo/{*,.[^.]*,..[^.]*}/
/var/foo/ . . . . . /
/var/foo/-d/
/var/foo/. . . . . ./
/var/foo/. d/
/var/foo/.-d/
/var/foo/..d/
/var/foo/.d/
/var/foo/.字_Ж/
/var/foo/d/
/var/foo/dir1/
/var/foo/dir2/
/var/foo/字/

    However, find /var/foo -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d is easier to both remember and type.

    Below is my original self-answer.

    If one cares not about files beginning with a dot then mibus' answer of

    ls -d /var/foo/*/

    would be short and effective. However if one would like the hidden files to be included then one needs to either stick with

    find /var/foo -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d

    or try 

    ls -FA /var/foo | grep /

    The -F places / and the end of directory names (as well as other characters for other types of files). The -A causes files starting with a dot to be included, except for '.' and '..'. That is why -a is not used. The grep won't get any false positives since '/' is not allowed in filenames (at least for POSIX filesystems).

    Regarding performance, on my Ubuntu Jaunty installation with just shy of 32k files and directories in /var/foo, find is the fastest, followed by ls -d, and ls -FA with grep comes in last.

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