How to go to each directory and execute a command?

If you're using GNU find, you can try -execdir parameter, e.g.:

find . -type d -execdir realpath "{}" ';'

or (as per @gniourf_gniourf comment):

find . -type d -execdir sh -c 'printf "%s/%s\n" "$PWD" "$0"' {} \;

Note: You can use ${0#./} instead of $0 to fix ./ in the front.

or more practical example:

find . -name .git -type d -execdir git pull -v ';'

If you want to include the current directory, it's even simpler by using -exec:

find . -type d -exec sh -c 'cd -P -- "{}" && pwd -P' \;

or using xargs:

find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -L1 sh -c 'cd "$0" && pwd && echo Do stuff'

Or similar example suggested by @gniourf_gniourf:

find . -type d -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do
# ...
done

The above examples support directories with spaces in their name.


Or by assigning into bash array:

dirs=($(find . -type d))
for dir in "${dirs[@]}"; do
  cd "$dir"
  echo $PWD
done

Change . to your specific folder name. If you don't need to run recursively, you can use: dirs=(*) instead. The above example doesn't support directories with spaces in the name.

So as @gniourf_gniourf suggested, the only proper way to put the output of find in an array without using an explicit loop will be available in Bash 4.4 with:

mapfile -t -d '' dirs < <(find . -type d -print0)

Or not a recommended way (which involves parsing of ls):

ls -d */ | awk '{print $NF}' | xargs -n1 sh -c 'cd $0 && pwd && echo Do stuff'

The above example would ignore the current dir (as requested by OP), but it'll break on names with the spaces.

See also:

  • Bash: for each directory at SO
  • How to enter every directory in current path and execute script? at SE Ubuntu

This answer posted by Todd helped me.

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d \( ! -name . \) -exec bash -c "cd '{}' && pwd" \;

The \( ! -name . \) avoids executing the command in current directory.


You can do the following, when your current directory is parent_directory:

for d in [0-9][0-9][0-9]
do
    ( cd "$d" && your-command-here )
done

The ( and ) create a subshell, so the current directory isn't changed in the main script.


You can achieve this by piping and then using xargs. The catch is you need to use the -I flag which will replace the substring in your bash command with the substring passed by each of the xargs.

ls -d */ | xargs -I {} bash -c "cd '{}' && pwd"

You may want to replace pwd with whatever command you want to execute in each directory.