Using LS for a specific path & file type without returing full file path?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18176113

  •  24-06-2022
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Question

I am writing a bash script and would like to use LS giving it a path/*.tar and have it return just file names instead of full path and file name to pass the file names through read into an array, below is what happens in terminal:

If i just use LS with a directory it returns:

admin@linuxbox:~$ ls  /home/admin/Backup/
0_BuIndex.txt.backup  Backup1376238064.tar  Backup1376239611.tar  Backup1376241919.tar
Backup1376167035.tar  Backup1376238960.tar  Backup1376240158.tar  Backup1376243097.tar
Backup1376168581.tar  Backup1376239110.tar  Backup1376241421.tar
Backup1376237070.tar  Backup1376239350.tar  Backup1376241489.tar
Backup1376237928.tar  Backup1376239479.tar  Backup1376241608.tar

Giving path & file type it returns:

admin@linuxbox:~$ ls  /home/admin/Backup/*.tar
/home/admin/Backup/Backup1376167035.tar  /home/admin/Backup/Backup1376239479.tar
/home/admin/Backup/Backup1376168581.tar  /home/admin/Backup/Backup1376239611.tar
/home/admin/Backup/Backup1376237070.tar  /home/admin/Backup/Backup1376240158.tar
/home/admin/Backup/Backup1376237928.tar  /home/admin/Backup/Backup1376241421.tar
/home/admin/Backup/Backup1376238064.tar  /home/admin/Backup/Backup1376241489.tar
/home/admin/Backup/Backup1376238960.tar  /home/admin/Backup/Backup1376241608.tar
/home/admin/Backup/Backup1376239110.tar  /home/admin/Backup/Backup1376241919.tar
/home/admin/Backup/Backup1376239350.tar  /home/admin/Backup/Backup1376243097.tar

I would like to use a command like the second but have it only return the file names without the path, my work around right now is to use

read -r -a TarArray <<< `ls -1 /home/admin/Backup | grep "tar"`

but I am hoping to find a solution that doesn't require me to pipe through grep.

Any ideas? Thanks all!

Was it helpful?

Solution

You could potentially use find for this :

find /home/admin/Backup -name \*.tar -printf '%f\n'

From the man page :

-printf format
    True;  print  format  on  the standard output,
    interpreting `\' escapes and `%' directives.
    ...
    %f     File's name with any leading directories
           removed (only the last element).

OTHER TIPS

So I know the answer has already been chosen but here is an option for using ls just in case you were curious:

ls /home/admin/Backup/*.tar | awk -F/ '{print $NF}'

Run the ls command from the directory:

( cd /home/admin/Backup ; ls *.tar )

But you really don't need to use the ls command for this. The shell already expands the *tar wildcard for you; all ls does in this case is print the arguments. So:

( cd /home/admin/Backup ; echo *.tar )

(Incidentally, your command with grep "tar" will list all files with "tar" anywhere in their names, not just files whose names end in .tar. If you wanted to use grep, you'd want grep '\.tar$'.)

You should not use ls for this. Instead, simply create an array with the full names:

files=(/path/to/dir/*.tar)

... and run basename on each element when you process the array.

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