Sometimes you may need to view or display directories & subdirectories only in a recursive manner in Linux. In this article, we will look at the different commands to list directories & subdirectories in Linux.
How to List Directories & Subdirectories in Linux
You can easily display directories & subdirectories in Linux using ls, tree, find, du command commands.
1. Using ls command
You can recursively list directories & subdirectories using ls -R command.
$ sudo ls -R .: project.txt progress.txt ./data: file1.txt file2.txt file3.txtThe above command lists files in present folder followed by separate sections for each subfolder. Within each section, it lists files in that subfolder.
If you do not specify any folder then ls command will recursively display folders & subfolders in present working directory. If you want to list directories & subdirectories of a specific folder (e.g. /home/ubuntu) mention it after ls command.
$ sudo ls -R /home/ubuntuIf you don’t want a recursive search but simply want to see all the folders & subfolders in a location, then you can pass the output of ls -all command to grep and filter it to list only directories, as shown below.
$ sudo ls -all | grep drw drwxr-xr-x 18 ubuntu ubuntu 4096 Jul 8 02:33 . drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 14 2020 .. drwxrwxr-x 2 ubuntu ubuntu 4096 Sep 2 2020 .aws drwx------ 4 ubuntu ubuntu 4096 Feb 7 2020 .cacheThe output of ls -all command displays file permissions of each file & directory. File permissions of directories start with ‘d’ while those of files start with ‘-‘. So when we use grep command with drw search string, it will show only directories.
2. Using find command
You can also use find command to list directories at a particular location using type -d option.
$ find . -type d #present location $ find /home/data -type d #directories in /home/dataIn this case, find command will only display the directories and not the files like ls -R command.
3. Using tree command
tree command can also be used to get list of directories & subdirectories. It is not installed by default in Linux. You can install it using following command.
$ sudo apt-get install treeHere is the tree command to list folders & subfolders.
$ sudo tree . -dIf you want to list folders & subfolders in a specific location, replace . above with that folder path e.g /home/data
$ sudo tree /home/data -d4. Using du command
You can also use du command to list folders & subfolders in Linux.
$ sudo du -a . $ sudo du -a /home/dataIn this article, we have looked at 4 different ways to list directories & subdirectories in Linux. Please note, that for find & tree command you need to mention folder location before options. In case of ls and du command you need to mention location after options.
In this tutorial, we’ll discuss how to list only directories for a given path in Linux. There are several ways to list only directories in Linux and we will cover a few of them here.
2. Using ls Command
The ls command is one of the most popular commands to list the contents of the directory. To only list directories, we can use this command with the ‘-d‘ option which only lists the directories in the current path and not their contents or sub-directories:
$ ls -d */ arch/ Documentation/ include/ lib/ scripts/ usr/ block/ drivers/ init/ mm/ security/ virt/ certs/ firmware/ ipc/ net/ sound/ crypto/ fs/ kernel/ samples/ tools/3. Using dir Command
The dir command lists the directory contents. When we use this command with the ‘-d‘ option, it will only show the details about the directories in the current path:
$ dir -d */ drwxr-xr-x 33 HARDIK users 4096 Feb 12 2018 arch/ drwxr-xr-x 3 HARDIK users 4096 Feb 12 2018 block/ drwxr-xr-x 2 HARDIK users 200 Feb 12 2018 certs/ drwxr-xr-x 4 HARDIK users 4096 Feb 12 2018 crypto/ drwxr-xr-x 122 HARDIK users 8192 Feb 12 2018 Documentation/ ... ... ... ... ... ... ...4. Using find Command
The find command searches for the file starting from the given starting point in a directory hierarchy. We can pass the expressions to this command to narrow down the search criteria. For instance, to list the file type directory, we can use ‘type‘ with the directory option ‘d‘. Also to avoid listing all the contents of subdirectories, we can limit the search level with the help of ‘maxdepth‘:
$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type d . ./Documentation ./arch ./block ./certs ./crypto ...5. Using tree Command
The tree command lists the contents of the directory in a depth indented tree-like format. We can use this command to show only directories with the help of the option ‘d‘. However, this may list all subdirectories and their contents, too. So we can use the level option (L) which limits the maximum display depth of the directory tree:
$ tree -d -L 1 . ├── arch ├── block ├── certs ├── crypto ├── Documentation ...6. Using echo Command
As we know that the echo command displays the string back to the standard output that we passed to it. We can also display the content of the directory using this command. If we try the ‘echo *‘ command, it will show all the contents of the current directory. Moreover, to only list directories we can use it like this:
$ echo */ arch/ block/ certs/ crypto/ Documentation/ drivers/ firmware/ fs/ include/ init/ ipc/ kernel/ lib/ mm/ net/ samples/ scripts/ security/ sound/ tools/ usr/7. Using grep with Other Commands
When we list the contents of the directory with the long listing option of ls command (ls -l) or dir command, we can see in the first column that regular files are shown as ‘–‘ and directories are shown as ‘d‘:
$ ls -l total 708 drwxr-xr-x 33 HARDIK users 4096 Feb 12 2018 arch drwxr-xr-x 3 HARDIK users 4096 Feb 12 2018 block drwxr-xr-x 2 HARDIK users 200 Feb 12 2018 certs -rw-r--r-- 1 HARDIK users 18693 Feb 12 2018 COPYING -rw-r--r-- 1 HARDIK users 98556 Feb 12 2018 CREDITS ... ... ... ... ... ... ...So from this output, we can filter directories with the help of the grep tool. Grep is just a Linux / Unix command-line tool used to search for a string of characters, so the option ‘^d‘ filters those strings that start with ‘d’.
7.1. Using grep with ls Command
If we can list all files and directories with ‘ls -l‘ and pass them to grep, we can filter them to keep only directories like this:
$ ls -l | grep '^d' drwxr-xr-x 33 HARDIK users 4096 Feb 12 2018 arch drwxr-xr-x 3 HARDIK users 4096 Feb 12 2018 block drwxr-xr-x 2 HARDIK users 200 Feb 12 2018 certs drwxr-xr-x 4 HARDIK users 4096 Feb 12 2018 crypto drwxr-xr-x 122 HARDIK users 8192 Feb 12 2018 Documentation ... ... ... ... ... ... ...7.2. Using grep with dir Command
We can use the grep command with the dir command as well in a similar way as shown above to list directories:
$ dir | grep '^d' drwxr-xr-x 33 HARDIK users 4096 Feb 12 2018 arch/ drwxr-xr-x 3 HARDIK users 4096 Feb 12 2018 block/ drwxr-xr-x 2 HARDIK users 200 Feb 12 2018 certs/ drwxr-xr-x 4 HARDIK users 4096 Feb 12 2018 crypto/ drwxr-xr-x 122 HARDIK users 8192 Feb 12 2018 Documentation/ ... ... ... ... ... ... ...8. Conclusion
In this article, we’ve discussed how to list only directories for any path in Linux. We’ve accomplished that using the commands ls, dir, find, tree, and echo.
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