How to go to each directory and execute a command? How to go to each directory and execute a command? bash bash

How to go to each directory and execute a command?


This answer posted by Todd helped me.

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d \( ! -name . \) -exec bash -c "cd '{}' && pwd" \;

The \( ! -name . \) avoids executing the command in current directory.


You can do the following, when your current directory is parent_directory:

for d in [0-9][0-9][0-9]do    ( cd "$d" && your-command-here )done

The ( and ) create a subshell, so the current directory isn't changed in the main script.


If you're using GNU find, you can try -execdir parameter, e.g.:

find . -type d -execdir realpath "{}" ';'

or (as per @gniourf_gniourf comment):

find . -type d -execdir sh -c 'printf "%s/%s\n" "$PWD" "$0"' {} \;

Note: You can use ${0#./} instead of $0 to fix ./ in the front.

or more practical example:

find . -name .git -type d -execdir git pull -v ';'

If you want to include the current directory, it's even simpler by using -exec:

find . -type d -exec sh -c 'cd -P -- "{}" && pwd -P' \;

or using xargs:

find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -L1 sh -c 'cd "$0" && pwd && echo Do stuff'

Or similar example suggested by @gniourf_gniourf:

find . -type d -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do# ...done

The above examples support directories with spaces in their name.


Or by assigning into bash array:

dirs=($(find . -type d))for dir in "${dirs[@]}"; do  cd "$dir"  echo $PWDdone

Change . to your specific folder name. If you don't need to run recursively, you can use: dirs=(*) instead. The above example doesn't support directories with spaces in the name.

So as @gniourf_gniourf suggested, the only proper way to put the output of find in an array without using an explicit loop will be available in Bash 4.4 with:

mapfile -t -d '' dirs < <(find . -type d -print0)

Or not a recommended way (which involves parsing of ls):

ls -d */ | awk '{print $NF}' | xargs -n1 sh -c 'cd $0 && pwd && echo Do stuff'

The above example would ignore the current dir (as requested by OP), but it'll break on names with the spaces.

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