How can I generate a list of files with their absolute path in Linux?

Question

I am writing a shell script that takes file paths as input.

For this reason, I need to generate recursive file listings with full paths. For example, the file bar has the path:

/home/ken/foo/bar

but, as far as I can see, both ls and find only give relative path listings:

./foo/bar   (from the folder ken)

It seems like an obvious requirement, but I can't see anything in the find or ls man pages.

How can I generate a list of files in the shell including their absolute paths?

Answer 1

If you give find an absolute path to start with, it will print absolute paths. For instance, to find all .htaccess files in the current directory:

find "$(pwd)" -name .htaccess

or if your shell expands $PWD to the current directory:

find "$PWD" -name .htaccess

find simply prepends the path it was given to a relative path to the file from that path.

Greg Hewgill also suggested using pwd -P if you want to resolve symlinks in your current directory.

Answer 2

readlink -f filename 

gives the full absolute path. but if the file is a symlink, u'll get the final resolved name.

Answer 3

Use this for dirs (the / after ** is needed in bash to limit it to directories):

ls -d -1 "$PWD/"**/

this for files and directories directly under the current directory, whose names contain a .:

ls -d -1 "$PWD/"*.*

this for everything:

ls -d -1 "$PWD/"**/*

Taken from here http://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2002/msg00033.html

In bash, ** is recursive if you enable shopt -s globstar.

Answer 4

You can use

find $PWD 

in bash

Answer 5

ls -d "$PWD/"*

This looks only in the current directory. It quotes "$PWD" in case it contains spaces.

Answer 6

The $PWD is a good option by Matthew above. If you want find to only print files then you can also add the -type f option to search only normal files. Other options are "d" for directories only etc. So in your case it would be (if i want to search only for files with .c ext):

find $PWD -type f -name "*.c" 

or if you want all files:

find $PWD -type f

Note: You can't make an alias for the above command, because $PWD gets auto-completed to your home directory when the alias is being set by bash.

Answer 7

If you give the find command an absolute path, it will spit the results out with an absolute path. So, from the Ken directory if you were to type:

find /home/ken/foo/ -name bar -print    

(instead of the relative path find . -name bar -print)

You should get:

/home/ken/foo/bar

Therefore, if you want an ls -l and have it return the absolute path, you can just tell the find command to execute an ls -l on whatever it finds.

find /home/ken/foo -name bar -exec ls -l {} ;\ 

NOTE: There is a space between {} and ;

You'll get something like this:

-rw-r--r--   1 ken admin       181 Jan 27 15:49 /home/ken/foo/bar

If you aren't sure where the file is, you can always change the search location. As long as the search path starts with "/", you will get an absolute path in return. If you are searching a location (like /) where you are going to get a lot of permission denied errors, then I would recommend redirecting standard error so you can actually see the find results:

find / -name bar -exec ls -l {} ;\ 2> /dev/null

(2> is the syntax for the Borne and Bash shells, but will not work with the C shell. It may work in other shells too, but I only know for sure that it works in Bourne and Bash).

Answer 8

Command: ls -1 -d "$PWD/"*

This will give the absolute paths of the file like below.

[root@kubenode1 ssl]# ls -1 -d "$PWD/"*
/etc/kubernetes/folder/file-test-config.txt
/etc/kubernetes/folder/file-test.txt
/etc/kubernetes/folder/file-client.txt

Answer 9

lspwd() { for i in $@; do ls -d -1 $PWD/$i; done }

Answer 10

Here's an example that prints out a list without an extra period and that also demonstrates how to search for a file match. Hope this helps:

find . -type f -name "extr*" -exec echo `pwd`/{} \; | sed "s|\./||"

Answer 11

find / -print will do this

Answer 12

ls -1 | awk  -vpath=$PWD/ '{print path$1}'