How to loop over directories in Linux?

Question

I an writing a script in Linux and need to go over all subdirectories names in a given directory. How can i loop these directories (and skip regular files).

For example, the given directory is /tmp/ and has the following subdirectories: /tmp/A, /tmp/B, /tmp/C I want to retrieve A,B,C.

Answer 1

find . -type d -maxdepth 1

Answer 2

cd /tmp
find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -exec basename '{}' \;

A short explanation: find finds files (quite obviously)

• . is the current directory, after the cd it's /tmp (IMHO this is more flexible than having /tmp directly in the find command. You have only one place, the cd, to change, if you want more actions to take place in this folder)

• -maxdepth 1 and -mindepth 1 make sure, that find really, only looks in the current dir and doesn't include '.' in the result

• -type d looks only for directories

• -exec basename '{}' \; calls basename for every result, hence stripping any leading ./

E voila!

Answer 3

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -printf "%P\n"

Answer 4

All answers so far uses find, so here's one with just the shell. No need for external tools in your case.

for dir in /tmp/*/
do
    dir=${dir%*/}
    echo ${dir##*/}
done