Roger Steve Ruiz is a software engineer

Iterating again and again

Let's iterate across files using ls and grep to copy or move files from a parent directory into a bunch of sibling directories related to the file. We can do this in an automated way using the commands mentioned above.

I sometimes find myself having to iterate across a bunch of directories. Usually, I have something to do in those directories like running an arbitrary command. There’s a lot of different ways to do things, but for the sake of this example, we’ll use ls to get the output of directories and iterate on them.

In this example, I have a file I need to copy across multiple directories. It’s a configuration file named config.yml that is adjacent to the directories I want to place it in.

/some/folder
├── folder1
│  ├── some-other-file.txt
│  └── config.yml
├── folder2
│  ├── some-other-file.txt
│  └── config.yml
├── config.yml # <= I want to copy this file into the other directories.
├── carpeta1
│  ├── algun-otro-archivo.txt
│  └── config.yml
├── carpeta2
│  ├── algun-otro-archivo.txt
│  └── config.yml

You could open a GUI window and copy / paste the file across. But instead of doing things manually, let’s have the computer do it for us. I’m going to break down my thought process of how I compose the loop to achieve this.

 Let’s see what’s inside the target directory

ls -p /some/folder

config.yml         carpeta1/          carpeta2/
folder1/           folder2/

With the -p flag on ls, we add a slash to any directories found. From the output above, you can see that we are including the config.yml file as well. We want to make sure we only include the directories and not the files we find. So let’s try this again.

 Let’s use grep

ls -p /some/folder | grep -E '.+\/'

carpeta1/          carpeta2/
folder1/           folder2/

Using grep and a regular expression to match at least one character .+ followed by a literal /. This gives us just the directories which we use ls -p to give a slash at the end.

 Let’s loop and copy

for dir in $(ls -p /some/folder | grep -E '.+\/')
do
  cp -v /some/folder/config.yml "/some/folder/${dir}"
done

/some/folder/config.yml -> /some/folder/folder1/config.yml
/some/folder/config.yml -> /some/folder/folder2/config.yml
/some/folder/config.yml -> /some/folder/carpeta1/config.yml
/some/folder/config.yml -> /some/folder/carpeta2/config.yml

Now that we have a list of directories, we can use a for-loop in Bash to iterate over all the directories. Once in the loop, we can run any arbitrary commands for the number of directories that exist. We also capture the current directory being iterated on in the ${dir} variable. Also, note that the ${dir} variable contains a trailing / character, so we omit the config.yml from the destination in the cp command.