How to go to each directory and execute a command?

Question

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.

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

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.

If the toplevel folder is known you can just write something like this:

for dir in `ls $YOUR_TOP_LEVEL_FOLDER`;
do
    for subdir in `ls $YOUR_TOP_LEVEL_FOLDER/$dir`;
    do
      $(PLAY AS MUCH AS YOU WANT);
    done
done

On the $(PLAY AS MUCH AS YOU WANT); you can put as much code as you want.

Note that I didn't "cd" on any directory.

Cheers,

for dir in PARENT/*
do
  test -d "$dir" || continue
  # Do something with $dir...
done