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Recurse through directories easily

Terminal - Recurse through directories easily
find . -type f | while read file; do cp $file ${file}.bak; done
2009-03-01 23:42:49
User: atoponce
Functions: cp find read
1
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Recurse through directories easily

This is a simple case of recursing through all directories, adding the '.bak' extension to every file. Of course, the 'cp $file $file.bak' could be any code you need to apply to your recursion, including tests, other functions, creating variables, doing math, etc. Simple and clean recursion.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

When it comes to acting on all these files, find can do it directly :

find . -type f -exec cp {} {}.bak \;
Comment by raphink 78 weeks and 2 days ago

right, except when you want to execute multiple lines of code. then find gets ugly with all the -exec switches. then when introducing logic, it gets even worse. no, with this example, you're using find for the recursion, then a while loop to operate on files, so you can nest several commands easily.

Comment by atoponce 78 weeks and 2 days ago

You left out the quotation marks around your variable references -

this code as it is will break when filenames have spaces.

Comment by asmoore82 77 weeks and 3 days ago

just for insanity's sake, *even with* the quotation marks, the code still breaks with filenames with newlines in them, but this does not:

USAGE: recfindexec

[code]

recfindexec() {

for dirs in "${1%/}"/*/; do [ -d "$dirs" ] && recfindexec "$dirs" "$2"; done

for files in "${1%/}"/$2; do [ -f "$files" ] && {

#YOUR CMDS IN HERE EX:

ls "$files"

} done

}

:P

Comment by asmoore82 77 weeks and 3 days ago

^^USAGE: recfindexec search_dir wildcard

ex:

recfindexec Videos "*.avi"
Comment by asmoore82 77 weeks and 3 days ago

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