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This article explains how to recursively loop through directories in Bash.

Looping through directories recursively in Bash

When dealing with different directories, it is often necessary to traverse the directories. We can use similar commands in all Linux terminals including Bash to recursively loop through the directories.

First, we use the find command to view the structure of the current directory. The find command will display all files and folders in the current or given directory.

View all files:

find . -type f -print0

To view the files in a specific directory:

find /mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1 -type f -print0

/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1 is the directory path we want to check.

The -type f option is used to get only the files of that directory and not the folders. The output of this command is as follows.

/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/Jiyik.java/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/jiyik.rtf/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/demo.bmp/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz /DemoFolder1/DemoFolder2/Jiyik.java/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/DemoFolder2/jiyik.rtf/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/DemoFolder2/demo.bmp/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1 /DemoFolder2/Example1.java/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/Example1.java/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/SubFolder/Jiyik.java/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/SubFolder/jiyik .rtf/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/SubFolder/demo.bmp/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/D

If you also want to get the folders of the directory, remove -type f from the above command .

find /mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1 -print0

Once we know the file name structure, we can recursively loop through the directory using the following code:

for x in $(find /mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1 -type f -print0)
do
    echo $x;
done;

The above code recursively loops through the directory /mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1 and echoes the name of each file. Look at the output of this command:

/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/Jiyik.java/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/jiyik.rtf/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/demo.bmp/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/DemoFolder2/Jiyik.java/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/DemoFolder2/jiyik.rtf/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/DemoFolder2/demo.bmp/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/DemoFolder2/Example1.java/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/Example1.java/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/SubFolder/Jiyik.java/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/SubFolder/jiyik.rtf/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/SubFolder/demo.bmp/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/SubFolder/Example1.java

Recursively loop through a directory to get files with a specific extension

As we can see, we don't need to display or process all files. We can also use this command with the -name option to get files with a specific extension.

View the command:

for x in $(find /mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1 -type f -name '*.java');
do
    echo $x;
done;

The above code will only print the files with extension .java in /mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1. See the output:

/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/Jiyik.java
/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/DemoFolder2/Jiyik.java
/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/DemoFolder2/Example1.java
/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/Example1.java
/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/SubFolder/Jiyik.java
/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/SubFolder/Example1.java

Recursively loop through directories to move files to another directory

We can also move files by recursively looping through directories using the Bash mv command; the syntax of this command is as follows.

mv -v $filename $destination directory

We can use this command in a recursive loop to move files to a target directory. Let us take an example.

for x in $(find /mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1 -type f -name '*.java');
do
    mv -v $x /mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder2
done;

DemoFolder2 is an empty directory.

Output:

renamed '/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/Jiyik.java' -> '/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder2/Jiyik.java'
renamed '/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/DemoFolder2/Jiyik.java' -> '/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder2/Jiyik.java'
renamed '/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/DemoFolder2/Example1.java' -> '/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder2/Example1.java'
renamed '/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/Example1.java' -> '/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder2/Example1.java'
renamed '/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/SubFolder/Jiyik.java' -> '/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder2/Jiyik.java'
renamed '/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1/SubFolder/Example1.java' -> '/mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder2/Example1.java'

As we can see, the command recursively loops through the directories and moves the files with the java extension to the target directory.

Recursively loop through directories to delete files

We can rm -rfremove files from a given directory using the command. The syntax of this command is as follows.

rm -rf $filename

Let's put this command in a recursive loop to recursively delete all the files from the directory.

for x in $(find /mnt/c/Users/Sheeraz/DemoFolder1 -type f);
do
    rm -rf $x
done;

The above script will delete all files in the main directory and subdirectories; it will not delete the folder because only files are selected in the command. See the output: