Is it possible to remove folder prefix from a `ls` command

Question

I am in a bash script and I want to get the list of all files (let say all jar files). I execute the command ls -1 lib/*.jar and I get the output:

lib/mylib_1.jar
lib/mylib_2.jar
...

Is there any option to have the following output:

mylib_1.jar
mylib_2.jar
...

Making cd lib before is not an option as I am in a loop and need to be in the parent folder for the actions I want to do inside the loop.

I tried to find information by typing man ls but I did not find any solution.

A solution with another command would be good as long I can pipe it to my ls command or self sufficient.

Answer 1

Instead of parsing ls you should use find instead. Then you can also execute basename on each file to strip the leading directories:

find lib/ -name '*.jar' -exec basename {} \;

Answer 2

With GNU find there is no need to run basename for every single file, this will be much faster (especially if there is a lot of files):

find lib -name '*.jar' -printf '%P\n'

Answer 3

How about (cd lib && echo *.jar), assuming that you don't have whitespace or special characters in the file names. Parent script never changes directory.

Answer 4

As Josh Jolly said in his answer, you should never parse ls, use the approach in his answer instead. Still, here's an awk solution to remove paths from file names, just don't use it with ls:

find . | awk -F'/' '{print $NF}'

The -F'/' sets the field separator to / which means that the last field, $NF, will be the file name.

Answer 5

find is probably the way to go, but if you really, really do (you don't) want to strip off lib/ from ls -1, you can use sed:

$ ls -1 lib/*.jar | sed 's#^lib/##'
mylib_1.jar
mylib_2.jar

Answer 6

You can do this using xargs with a --max-args (or the shorter alias -n) parameter:

ls --quoting-style=c -1 lib/*.jar | xargs --max-args 1 basename ls --quoting-style=c -1 lib/*.jar | xargs -n 1 basename

Note that we use --quoting-style=c to make sure spaces in filenames do not screw up xargs.

Answer 7

An alternative way solve your query is to list all the files using ls -R. Combine the output of ls command with grep to list only .jar files. You can use following command to do the same for your query:

ls -R lib | grep jar| grep -v jar*