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Shamim Hafiz - MSFT
Asked: 2013-06-14 12:06:04 +0800 CST

How to Search for Files Recursively into Subdirectories

  • 772

I am trying to look for all XML files in a particular directory and all sub-directories (recursively) inside it.

ls -R *.xml is only listing files in the current directory. I am quite sure, the sub-folders themselves have several .xml files, but none are showing up.

Is this a configuration issue?

directory

5 Answers

  1. You can do it with find only:

    find . -name '*.xml'

    . is the current directory. If you need to search in another directory, replace . with the directory path.

    • 220
  2. Best Answer

    Try using Find

    sudo find . -print | grep -i '.*[.]xml'
    • 133

  3. Try this command:

    ls -R | grep '.*[.]xml'

    ls doesn't have options to filter the output. For that you would need to use pipe. This passes the output from ls to grep, which then filters them to show just the .xml files.

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  4. bash

    Using globstar shell option, we can make use of recursive globbing ./**/*

    bash-4.3$ shopt -s globstar
bash-4.3$ for i in  ./**/*.xml; do printf "%s\n" "$i" ; done
./adwaita-timed.xml
./bin/hw5/stuff/book/chapter42servletexample/build/web/META-INF/context.xml
./bin/hw5/stuff/book/chapter42servletexample/build/web/WEB-INF/beans.xml
./bin/hw5/stuff/book/chapter42servletexample/build/web/WEB-INF/web.xml

    Perl

    Perl has a module Find, which allows for recursive directory tree traversal. Within the special find() function, we can define a wanted subroutine and the directory that we want to traverse, in this example that's .. The one-liner in such case would be:

    bash-4.3$ perl -le 'use File::Find; find(sub{-f && $_ =~ /.xml$/ && print $File::Find::name},".")' 
./adwaita-timed.xml
./CLEAR_DESKTOP/blahblah/hw5/stuff/book/jsf2demo/build/web/WEB-INF/beans.xml
./CLEAR_DESKTOP/blahblah/hw5/stuff/book/jsf2demo/build/web/WEB-INF/web.xml
./CLEAR_DESKTOP/blahblah/hw5/stuff/book/liangweb/build.xml

    Python

    While Perl has a whole module dedicated to recursive tree traversal, Python has a neat function walk() that is part of os module, and repeatedly returns tuple of topmost path, list of all subdirectories, and list of filenames. We can do the following:

    bash-4.3$ python -c 'import os,sys; [ sys.stdout.write(os.path.join(r,i)+"\n") for r,s,f in os.walk(".") for i in f if i.endswith(".xml") ]' 
./adwaita-timed.xml
./CLEAR_DESKTOP/blahblah/hw5/stuff/book/jsf2demo/build/web/WEB-INF/beans.xml
./CLEAR_DESKTOP/blahblah/hw5/stuff/book/jsf2demo/build/web/WEB-INF/web.xml
./CLEAR_DESKTOP/blahblah/hw5/stuff/book/liangweb/build.xml

    This might be far neater as a script:

    #!/usr/bin/env python
import os,sys 
for r,s,f in os.walk("."): 
    for i in f: 
        if i.endswith(".xml") 
             print(os.path.join(r,i))

    find

    Other answers have mentioned find for recursive traversal, and that's the go-to tool for the job. What does need mention is the fact that find has multiple command line switches, such as -printf to print output in desired format, -type f to find only regular files, -inum to search by inode number, -mtime to search by modification date, -exec <command> {} \; to execute a particular command to process the file with passing file as argument ( where {} is standard find placeholder for current file) , and many others so please read the manpage for find.

    • 6

  5. Inside the Gnome Filemanager you can click on the magnifying-glass icon (in the top-right usually) and then start typing to search in the current folder.

    For some people (me) this is much easier that using the command-line.

    • 0