Hi

I need to, through a bash script, go through a given directory (given as argument 1) to list out the relative path in this directory (including $1) for eact subdirectory which contains files. Directories which only contain . .. and eventually only subdirectories SHALL NOT be listed. It is this last requirement that makes it difficult for me.

I have been using the tree command for now, but I have not found a way to ignore paths to directories which only contains other subdirs or nothing at all in any easy way. I may offcourse test each directory after they are listed but this gives an extra loop to go through and I beleive it should be possible to do it directly when creatring the list.

I guess by using find or ls in conjuntion with the tree command or by itself it should be possible but I am not to conversant of nested script commands.


Any hope?


Breg
Vidar

Try something like
find */ -type d

If the format isn't what you need, look at find's -printf command and it's control string to control exactly how the results are printed.

How about using a recursively called function to walk the directory tree and print out its path if it is called to work on a directory that contains files?

So basically, if I understand it right, you want a list of directories that contain files, and you don't want to include ones that contain subdirectories only, even if those subdirectories contain files.

I think this will do it.
PS: I don't think it's easily possible to do it in a one-liner, since you have to filter for multiple conditions: whether it's empty, whether it contains files, and whether it contains directories.


(Edited upon re-reading OP. I misunderstood the requirements the first time)

Another, similar way:

wouldn't

find . ! -type d

do the job?

That gives you a list of files. But according to the OP, he wants a list of directories that contain files.

But that does give me an idea for another way to do it:

Hi
Thanks to all for your participation. Through your input I learned a lot, including useful tricks that I can use in other scripts later even though it did not solve this particular problem.

However, Davids final contribution found its way into my script.

I use the script to generate patches of a module in my build. I also added a few parameters since I had to exclude a few folders that else was listed with any of the methods above (and I did not tell that I needed to exclude anything either, so no-one to blame) and my final usage looks like this, for your reference.

$ptree is just where I store the list listed to be used later in the script.

Thanks to all

Breg
Vidar

Come to think of it, we can make my last suggestion even cleaner. I just remembered that you can use find's -printf function to output the directory path, so we don't need to call on the external dirname command.
Also, filtering with "!-type d" will not filter out non-file entries such as symlinks or pipes. If that's a problem, you'll have to filter them too.

I tested it and off course it gave the same result, but you knew that already, didn't you As a bonus it also went faster whit printf.