I often have deep directory trees where I am only interested in the deepest layers and not the supporting sub directories. An example of this might be a music collection where you have moved all your albums into directories based on artist name, then album, then disk, then songs etc. I wanted a script to be able to display all the deepest directories in a directory tree. Take this tree as an example:
$find -type d . ./x ./x/y ./x/y/z ./a ./a/b ./a/b/c ./1 ./b ./b/b ./c ./c/c ./c/c/c ./c/c/c/c ./c/c/c/c/c ./c/c/c/c/c/c ./11 ./11/2 ./11/2/3 ./11/1 ./11/1/1 ./11/1/1/1 ./11/1/11 ./11/11 ./11/11/11 ./z |
I put this script together which cycles through the output of the find command looking for directories only and then compares this line to the previous one.
$ cat twigs #!/bin/bash LASTTWIG="" for LINE in `find -type d`;do if [ ! "${LASTTWIG}" = "" ];then echo ${LINE} | grep ${LASTTWIG}/ > /dev/null if [ "$?" != "0" ]; then echo ${LASTTWIG} fi fi LASTTWIG=${LINE} done echo ${LASTTWIG} |
The last echo is necessary to get the last directory which will always be a end of chain directory. The output gives something like this.
[user@localhost x]$ ./twigs ./x/y/z ./a/b/c ./1 ./b/b ./c/c/c/c/c/c ./11/2/3 ./11/1/1/1 ./11/1/11 ./11/11/11 ./z [user@localhost x]$ |
One strange issue I ran across when using a find -type d | while read LINE;do iteration was that the pipe caused the last line not to work as the variable was stored in a sub process as the pipe | executed the while loop in a sub shell. The post Variable Scope in Bash helped to clear it up.
