Find and enter that directory?

Question

I want to do some task in every directory in current path so I tried

for DIRECTORY in `find . -type d -maxdepth 1`
do
    cd $DIRECTORY

    #DO STUFF

    cd ..
done

but I got a long error of no such file.

updateall.sh: line 5: cd: ./abc No such file or directory

Why ? I tried cd ./abc and it was fine.

thanks

Answer 1

You need to add -mindepth 1. Otherwise you cd .. out from the original base directory in the first loop repetition and end up in its parent directory.

Easy to notice when you dry-run the find expression:

$ find . -type d -maxdepth 1
.
./abc

In the first loop, you cd ., which does nothing, and then cd .., from which you're unable to enter all the other directories you found.

---

If it's no problem with spaces in directory names, you can always find $PWD instead of find . to use absolute paths, or store the original $PWD in a variable you can cd to ($OLDPWD and cd - likely won't work though), instead of cd ...

Answer 2

You might consider using -execdir, if you're using gnu-find. It's similar to -exec, but will execute the command from the directory. (It might be an ad hoc script, if it would fill multiple lines for example.)

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -execdir dostuff ";" 

Using

for DIRECTORY in `find ...`

is vulnerable to blanks and similar stuff in directory names.

Example:

mkdir "a a"
echo "123" > a 

for f in $(find . -mindepth 1 -type d); do echo "using $f"; ls -l $f ; done 
using ./a
-rw-r--r-- 1 stefan stefan 4 2012-01-13 08:15 ./a
using a
-rw-r--r-- 1 stefan stefan 4 2012-01-13 08:15 a