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

Question

I am trying to search for all files of a given type in a given folder and copy them to a new folder.

I need to specify a root folder and search through that folder and all of its subfolders for any files that match the given type.

How do I search the root folder's subfolders and their subfolders? It seems like a recursive method would work, but I cannot implement one correctly.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.