I am having a very basic problem with the ls command.

The ls with recursive option and file name doesn't work.

Version: Ubuntu; 6.06 LTS (Dapper D)

Entering ls command from a terminal window:

When I do "ls -R" I get what I expect, a recursive list of all files

When I do "ls a*" I also get what I expect - list of files starting with "a" in the current directory.

But when I combine them: "ls -R a*" looking for a list of all files starting with a in the current directory and all subdirectories, it appears to ignore the "-R" option, only returning results from the current directory.

For another example, I know I have files in a subdirectory beginning with W; But when I do "ls -R W* " it says No Such File or Directory; If I do ls -R then I can see files starting with W.

Answer:

Actually, it's the shell (ie Bash) that expands the "W*" to the names of all files/directories in the current directory that start with "W", prior to passing the expansion result to "ls".

So, let's say I have, in my current directory:

W1.txt
W2.txt
W3 - a subdirectory

Than, "ls W*", will actually be performed as "ls W1.txt W2.txt W3" ("ls" gets 3 input parameters, not just the 'W*').

Following this idea, then you can't locate files with names starting with W in all subdirectories by simply calling

Code:

ls -R W*As this is performed as follows:

1. The shell expands "W*" to all names of files/directories IN THE CURRENT DIRECTORY that have names starting with "W". If there aren't any, you'll get "No such file or directory".

2. If the shell did find some files/directories with W, it'll pass them all to "ls" as input parameters.

3. "ls -R" is performed for each of the parameters "ls" gets from the shell (if there are any).

To find all files starting with W in a recursive way (ie in the current directory and all subdirectories), you
need to use "find", not "ls". Example:

Code:

find . -name 'W*'You may add "-type f" option to find to restrict the output to regular files (ie no directories, symbolic links, fifo pipes, device files, etc).
"-maxdepth n" restricts the number of recursively searched levels to "n".

For more details on "find" and "ls", please read their respective man pages.

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