script to traverse through directories and subdirectories to list files

#!/bin/bash
#script to loop through directories to merge files
mydir=/data/
files="/data/*"
for f in $files
do if[ -d "$f" ] then for ff in $f/* do echo "Processing $ff" done else echo "Processing $f" fi
done

I have the above code to go through directories and sub-directories and list all the files. I am getting the error: syntax error near unexpected token `then'

What am I doing wrong here?

3 Answers

if [ -d "$f" ] ^

There needs to be a space between if and [. If you don't have a space, bash thinks you're trying to execute a command named if[.

files="/data/*"
for f in $files

Also know that this won't work. To store a wildcard expansion in a variable like that you need to use an array. The syntax is a bit hairier...

files=(/data/*)
for f in "${files[@]}"

Or you could write the wildcard inline the way you do with the inner loop. That would work fine.

for f in "$mydir"/*

For what it's worth, you could use find to recurse through all files and sub-directories recursively.

find /data/ -type f -print0 | while read -d $'\0' file; do echo "Processing $file"
done

-type f matches files only. -print0 combined with -d $'\0' is a way to be extra careful with file names containing characters like spaces, tabs, and even newlines. It is legal to have these characters in file names so I like to write my scripts in a way that can handle them.

Note that this will recurse deeper than just sub-directories. It'll go all the way down. If that's not what you want, add -maxdepth 2.

As an alternative, you could probably replace this entire loop with something like

# find all files either in /data or /data/subdir
find /data -type f -maxdepth 2 | while read file; do echo $file;
end

Here's a function that does what you ask, you pass it a folder see the call at the bottom func_process_folder_set "/folder".

 # --- -------------------------------- --- # # FUNC: Process a folder of files # --- -------------------------------- --- # func_process_folder_set(){ FOLDER="${1}" while read -rd $'\0' file; do fileext=${file##*.} # -- get the .ext of file case ${fileext,,} # -- make ext lowercase for checking in case statement echo "FILE: $file" # -- print the file (always use " " to handle file spaces) done < <(find ${FOLDER} -type f -maxdepth 20 -name '*.*' -print0) } # -- call the function above with this: func_process_folder_set "/some/folder"