The ls command is used to list directory contents when using the bash shell (and other shells), and has a variety of flags to choose what to display and how to format. This post shows how to list just the directories using ls.
Use the -d flag
Let's say we have the following directory at /tmp/test with three files and three directories:
$ ls -l drwxr-xr-x 2 chris 1000 4096 Oct 13 09:55 1 -rw-r--r-- 1 chris 1000 0 Oct 13 09:55 1.txt drwxr-xr-x 2 chris 1000 4096 Oct 13 09:55 2 -rw-r--r-- 1 chris 1000 0 Oct 13 09:55 2.txt drwxr-xr-x 2 chris 1000 4096 Oct 13 09:55 3 -rw-r--r-- 1 chris 1000 0 Oct 13 09:55 3.txt
Doing ls -ld /tmp/test will only show /tmp/test:
$ ls -ld /tmp/test drwxr-xr-x 5 chris 1000 4096 Oct 13 09:55 /tmp/test
Adding /*/ to the end of the directory will then show the subdirectories:
$ ls -ld /tmp/test/*/ drwxr-xr-x 2 chris 1000 4096 Oct 13 09:55 /tmp/test/1/ drwxr-xr-x 2 chris 1000 4096 Oct 13 09:55 /tmp/test/2/ drwxr-xr-x 2 chris 1000 4096 Oct 13 09:55 /tmp/test/3/
If you leave the trailing slash off, then it will show the files as well as directories. To just show the subdirectories of the current directory instead of passing a full path, query */ like so:
$ ls -ld */ drwxr-xr-x 2 chris 1000 4096 Oct 13 09:55 1/ drwxr-xr-x 2 chris 1000 4096 Oct 13 09:55 2/ drwxr-xr-x 2 chris 1000 4096 Oct 13 09:55 3/
Note that I've used the -l flag in the above examples to show the file information, but you can also do it without, e.g.: ls -d */
On a Mac
The above example output was done on Debian Linux; I've noticed on my Mac there's an extra trailing slash at the end in the directory list:
ls -ld */ drwxr-xr-x 2 chris wheel 68 13 Oct 10:01 1// drwxr-xr-x 2 chris wheel 68 13 Oct 10:01 2// drwxr-xr-x 2 chris wheel 68 13 Oct 10:01 3//
Unfortunately this seems unavoidable, because doing "ls -ld *" will show the files too. Another possibility to not show the trailing slash, if it bothers you, is to pipe an ls -l result through grep. This will be slower if it's a large directory:
ls -l | grep ^d drwxr-xr-x 2 chris wheel 68 13 Oct 10:01 1/ drwxr-xr-x 2 chris wheel 68 13 Oct 10:01 2/ drwxr-xr-x 2 chris wheel 68 13 Oct 10:01 3/
Other suggestions
If you have any other suggestions, please leave them in the comments below.
