How to retrieve folders name in a directory with bash

Question

I'm trying to get the names of the folders inside another folder. I was trying to use the bellow code but the problem is that it return the full address of the folder instead of just the folder name

for folder in /[my folder]/*; do cat $folder;  done

With this I get /[my folder]/subfolder1, what I expected was just the subfolder1.

Thank you

Answer 1

cat is a program that simply takes its input stream, or a file, and prints it to standard output. You cannot cat a directory, that doesn't make sense. If you just want to see the names of all first level subdirectories of a given directory, you can use echo which simply prints what you give it:

$ for dir in foo/*/; do echo "$dir"; done
foo/dir1/
foo/dir2/
foo/dir3/
foo/dir4/

You don't even need a loop:

$ echo foo/*/
foo/dir1/ foo/dir2/ foo/dir3/ foo/dir4 

To get only the directory names, without the path:

$ for dir in foo/*/; do basename "$dir"; done
dir1
dir2
dir3
dir4

Alternatively, you can cd to the path:

$ cd foo
$ echo */
dir1/ dir2/ dir3/ dir4/

Or cd in a subshell so you stay where you were originally when the command finishes:

$ ( cd foo && echo */ )
dir1/ dir2/ dir3/ dir4/

Or, to get them on separate lines and also to ensure that this will work even on weird directory names (e.g. a name that contains a newline):

    $ ( cd foo && printf -- '%s\n' */ ) 
    dir1/
    dir2/
    dir3/
    dir4/
    

Finally, if your directory names can contain newlines or other strangeness, use: