How do I check if a directory has child directories?

Using bash, how do I write an if statement that checks if a certain directory, stored in the a script variable named "$DIR", contains child directories that are not "." or ".."?

开发者_C百科Thanks, - Dave

---

As the comments have pointed out, things have changed in the last 9 years! The dot dirs are no longer returned as part of find and instead the directory specified in the find command is.

So, if you want to stay with this approach:

#!/bin/bash
subdircount=$(find /tmp/test -maxdepth 1 -type d | wc -l)

if [[ "$subdircount" -eq 1 ]]
then
    echo "none of interest"
else
    echo "something is in there"
fi

(originally accepted answer from 2011)

#!/usr/bin/bash
subdircount=`find /d/temp/ -maxdepth 1 -type d | wc -l`

if [ $subdircount -eq 2 ]
then
    echo "none of interest"
else
    echo "something is in there"
fi

---

Here's a more minimalist solution that will perform the test in a single line..

ls $DIR/*/ >/dev/null 2>&1 ; 

if [ $? == 0 ]; 
then 
  echo Subdirs
else 
  echo No-subdirs
fi

By putting / after the * wildcard you select only directories, so if there is no directories then ls returns error-status 2 and prints the message ls: cannot access <dir>/*/: No such file or directory. The 2>&1 captures stderr and pipes it into stdout and then the whole lot gets piped to null (which gets rid of the regular ls output too, when there is files).

---

I'm not really sure what you trying to do here, but you can use find:

find /path/to/root/directory -type d

If you want to script it:

find $DIR/* -type d

should do the trick.

---

Try this as the condition you test against:

subdirs=$(ls  -d $DIR/.*/ | grep -v "/./\|/../")

subdirs will be empty if there are no subdirectories

---

A solution in pure bash, without needing any other program execution. This is not the most compact solution, but if run in a loop, it could be more efficient because no process creation is needed. If there is a lot of files in '$dir', the filename expansion could break though.

shopt -s dotglob   # To include directories beginning by '.' in file expansion.
nbdir=0
for f in $dir/*
do
  if [ -d $f ]
  then
    nbdir=$((nbdir+1))
  fi
done

if [ nbdir -gt 0 ]
then
   echo "Subdirs"
else
   echo "No-Subdirs"
fi

---

in my case it doesn't work as @AIG wrote - for empty dir I got subdircount=1 (find returns only dir itself).

what works for me:

#!/usr/bin/bash
subdircount=`find /d/temp/ -maxdepth 1 -type d | wc -l`
if [ $subdircount -ge 2 ]
then
    echo "not empty"
else
    echo "empty"
fi

---

I'd like to know if a directory has any subdirectories. For this purpose I don't need recursion, and I don't care what they are. So:

(find -L . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | wc -l)

---

How about:

num_child=`ls -al $DIR | grep -c -v ^d`

If $num_child > 2, then you have child directories. If you do not want hidden directories, replace ls -al with ls -l.

if [ $num_child -gt 2 ]
then
    echo "$num_child child directories!"
fi

---

Here is the best answer you will ever see on this issue.

function hasDirs ()
{
    declare $targetDir="$1"    # Where targetDir ends in a forward slash /
    ls -ld ${targetDir}*/
}

If you are already in the target directory:

if hasDirs ./
then

fi

If you want to know about another directory:

if hasDirs /var/local/   # Notice the ending slash
then

fi