ls'ing through an entire directory tree to produce one pipeable list of files

Question

This might have been answered already. But I wasn't able to find it.

I have:

directory
directory/subdirectory/subdirectoryofsubdirectory
directory/sub-subdirectory/subdirectoryofsub-subdirectory/subdirectoryofsubdirectoryofsub-subdirectory
directory/sub-sub-subdirectory
directory/sub-sub-sub-subdirectory

each directory and subdirectory contains files. I want to list them all, pipe the list to cat, and cat the list to a text file. Can this be done with a 'one liner'? If so, please provide it. Or does it require a script and, if so, what commands/structures will I need to write the script?

Answer 1

I think that your best bet is the find command. If you want just the files and not the directories in your list, something like this:

find directory/ -type f -print > textfile

The find command will recursively list the files. (If you want the directories listed too, remove the -type f). The > textfile redirects stdout to a file named textfile with no need for cat.

find is a powerful tool with many options. See man find if you find that you need to tweak the output slightly.

UPDATE (thanks gvkv):

If you want to put the contents of the files into a single text file, then one way to do it is:

find Documents/ -type f -exec cat {} + > textfile

Answer 2

find is the generic way, as Steven D's answer explains. If your shell supports it, ** can be used to match any number of subdirectories (on bash it's the same as * and only matches one by default, but see Dennis' comment), so you can just do:

cat **/*