Unix: check if file is folder

Question

So I need to loop through a tree of directories, currently I can print off all the files in a directory, but once that is done I need to be able to go into the subfolders of the starting directory and so on. My Program prints off the files and the folders as a start, but I need to check each one to make sure it is a directory and then enter it. Could someone provide some guidance on this?

Answer 1

help test yields

test: test [expr]

[...]

-d FILE True if file is a directory.

[...]

Exit Status: Returns success if EXPR evaluates to true; fails if EXPR evaluates to false or an invalid argument is given.

test can be abbreviated with [, so you can do

if [ -d "$file" ]; then
    # do stuff
fi

Answer 2

test -d myFileOrFolder

but what you describe looks like the behaviour of find.

Answer 3

From comments entered to some of the responses I am guessing you want to run some script in each of the directory. In that case one of the possible ways is to use find with exec options as follow:

find ./ -type d -exec sh -c "cd {} && <your_script_with_absolute_path>" \;

For example, in the current dir there is a script test.sh & you want to execute it in each of the subdir in the current dir then

find ./ -type d -exec sh -c "cd {} && `pwd`/test.sh" \;

To the find command -type d will ask to look for all directories in path ./ passed as first argument. -exec will execute command for each such find, in this case sh -c which is creating a shell & executing a command with quotes, {} indicates the argument found by find command.
Hope this helps!

Answer 4

Use the -d operator to test for the existence of a directory:

if [ -d "$DIR" ]; then
    ...
fi

Answer 5

Pseudo code:

[ -d your_filename ] && it's a folder ...

Answer 6

find . -type d

this finds all subdirectories

Answer 7

Based on some of the comments, I'm guessing that you don't actually want to print the directories, but rather process all of the regular files in a directory tree (including all of the subdirectories). If that's the case, you may want to take a look at the exec option to find.

From memory, you probably want something like this (using the cat command to stand in for your script):

find . -type f -exec cat {} \;

In this example, all of the non-directory files in the entire tree (recursively) will be processed by cat (printed to standard out).