How to search a folder and all of its subfolders for files of a certain type

Try this:

Dir.glob("#{folder}/**/*.pdf")

which is the same as

Dir["#{folder}/**/*.pdf"]

Where the folder variable is the path to the root folder you want to search through.

You want the Find module. Find.find takes a string containing a path, and will pass the parent path along with the path of each file and sub-directory to an accompanying block. Some example code:

require 'find'

pdf_file_paths = []
Find.find('path/to/search') do |path|
  pdf_file_paths << path if path =~ /.*\.pdf$/
end

That will recursively search a path, and store all file names ending in .pdf in an array.

If speed is a concern, prefer Dir.glob over Find.find.

Warming up --------------------------------------
           Find.find   124.000  i/100ms
            Dir.glob   515.000  i/100ms
Calculating -------------------------------------
           Find.find      1.242k (± 4.7%) i/s -      6.200k in   5.001398s
            Dir.glob      5.249k (± 4.5%) i/s -     26.265k in   5.014632s

Comparison:
            Dir.glob:     5248.5 i/s
           Find.find:     1242.4 i/s - 4.22x slower

 

require 'find'
require 'benchmark/ips'

dir = '.'

Benchmark.ips do |x|
  x.report 'Find.find' do
    Find.find(dir).select { |f| f =~ /\*\.pdf/ }
  end

  x.report 'Dir.glob' do
    Dir.glob("#{dir}/**/*\.pdf")
  end

  x.compare!
end

Using ruby 2.2.2p95 (2015-04-13 revision 50295) [x86_64-darwin15]