Execute command on all files in a directory

I'm doing this on my Raspberry Pi from the commandline by running:

for i in *; do cmd "$i"; done

How about this:

find /some/directory -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec cmd option {} \; > results.out
  • -maxdepth 1 argument prevents find from recursively descending into any subdirectories. (If you want such nested directories to get processed, you can omit this.)
  • -type -f specifies that only plain files will be processed.
  • -exec cmd option {} tells it to run cmd with the specified option for each file found, with the filename substituted for {}
  • \; denotes the end of the command.
  • Finally, the output from all the individual cmd executions is redirected to results.out

However, if you care about the order in which the files are processed, you might be better off writing a loop. I think find processes the files in inode order (though I could be wrong about that), which may not be what you want.


The following bash code will pass $file to command where $file will represent every file in /dir

for file in /dir/*
do
  cmd [option] "$file" >> results.out
done

Example

el@defiant ~/foo $ touch foo.txt bar.txt baz.txt
el@defiant ~/foo $ for i in *.txt; do echo "hello $i"; done
hello bar.txt
hello baz.txt
hello foo.txt

Tags:

Scripting

Bash