Linux: execute a command for each directory of current directory

Scenario

Konstantinos Patronas

Oct 15, 2020·2 min read

you are in ~/scripts and you have several subdirectories like the following image:

You want for each directory of scripts to execute a command, which in our case the command is “git init”, the long and borring way is to cd each directory and execute the command. If you dont have many directories this borring but still feasible, if the directories where lets say 100, would be a very hard task, of course you can do some scripting but bash has some very nice one liners for such tasks

Solution

$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type d \( ! -name . \) -exec bash -c "cd '{}' && git init" \;

Executing this will produce:

We can see that git init executed in each directory, lets explain the parameters

• find: the find command
• . : The dot instructs find to start searching from current directory
• -maxdepth 1: if a directory has subdirectories dont go in!
• -type d: we care only for directories, ignore anything else
• \( ! -name . \): ignore current directory
• -exec bash -c "cd '{}' && git init" \;”: for each found directory execute bash with the command we pass after the -c switch, the {} will be replaced with the found directory

I hope you found this article useful :)