bash - test if files and folders exists in a for statement - bash

Question

I'm trying to print all files and folders of a directory.
The problem is that the print out of the if (echo "$f out of if") is ok, but the code never execute the prints inside the if statements.
I'm sure that files and folders exists (printed out of if) and I checked the permissions.
dirPath is /tmp/testFolder.
for f in `ls $dirPath`; do
echo "$f out of if"
if [ -d $f ]; then
echo "$f is a directory"
fi
if [ -f $f ]; then
echo "$f is a file"
fi
done
EDIT:
Thank you at all to answer!! I tryied this solution but I found the problem that "tmp/testFolder" (dirPath) is recognized as a folder too into the for-loop (and I need to find subfolder only).:
shopt -s globstar
for f in "$dirPath"/**; do
echo "$f out of if"
if [ -d $f ]; then
echo "$f is a directory"
fi
if [ -f $f ]; then
echo "$f is a file"
fi
done

Answer 1

The problem with your code is that the f variable doesn't contain the full path to the file(s) in your target directory. So unless you give current directory, the tests for "directory" and "file" are always going to fail.
You could prefix with the $dirPath in your if statements (such as if [ -d "$dirPath/$f" ]; then echo "$dirPath/$f is a directory"; fi). Or better yet, use glob expansion in for loop instead which would give you full path to each file.
#!/bin/bash
for f in "$dirPath"/*; do
if [ -d "$f" ]; then
echo "$f is a directory"
elif [ -f "$f" ]; then
echo "$f is a file"
fi
done

Answer 2

The code in if doesn't execute because there is no namefile1 in the current directory, which is what your code is checking. That is, $f does not include $dirPath (the directory prefix) the way your code is written.
Better:
for f in "$dirPath"/*; do
echo "$f out of if"
if [ -d "$f" ]; then
echo "$f is a directory"
fi
if [ -f "$f" ]; then
echo "$f is a file"
fi
done
See also the following list of bash pitfalls:
for f in $(ls *.mp3)
[ -n $foo ] or [ -z $foo ]

Answer 3

The problem is, that $f is a relative path. So $f is test.file, but you want to check /tmp/testFolder/test.file. The proper solution would be:
for f in "$dirPath"/*; do
echo "$f out of if"
if [ -d "$f" ]; then
echo "$f is a directory"
fi
if [ -f "$f" ]; then
echo "$f is a file"
fi
done

Answer 4

The immediate problem is that f is set to only the filename, not the entire path. That is, if /tmp/testFolder contains a file named example.txt, f will be set to just "example.txt", so if [ -d $f ]; then is checking for a file named "example.txt" in the current working directory, not in /tmp/testFolder. One option would be to use if [ -d $dirPath/$f ]; then, but there's a better way.
As a general rule, you shouldn't parse the output of ls because its output is ambiguous in several ways. To get a list of files in a particular directory, just use dirpath/* -- this gets a list of matching files without any of the ambiguity or parsing problems you'll have with ls. Bonus: it includes the specified path as part of the result (for example, /tmp/testFolder/* might give "/tmp/testFolder/example.txt").
Another suggestion: you should (almost) always put variable references in double-quotes, e.g. "$f" instead of just $f.
Fixing all of this gives:
for f in "$dirPath"/*; do # Note that $dirPath should be quoted, but * cannot be
echo "$f out of if"
if [ -d "$f" ]; then
echo "$f is a directory"
fi
if [ -f "$f" ]; then
echo "$f is a file"
fi
done
Note that the echo commands will also give the full path. If you don't want that, you can either use the basename command to get just the name portion, e.g. f_name="$(basename "$f")", or (as #melpomene pointed out) use the expansion "${f##*/}" (which trims up to the last "/" in the variable):
for f in "$dirPath"/*; do
f_name="${f##*/}" # The quotes are not strictly needed in an assignment, but do no harm
echo "$f_name out of if"
if [ -d "$f" ]; then
echo "$f_name is a directory"
fi
if [ -f "$f" ]; then
echo "$f_name is a file"
fi
done
Oh, and there's one possible downside to using a wildcard instead of ls: it'll return the raw wildcard if there are no matches. It doesn't matter in this case, but for places where it does you can either start the loop with [ -e "$f" ] || continue (i.e. skip the loop if there's nothing actually there), or if you're using bash (not just a generic shell) you can set the nullglob shell option (shopt -s nullglob).
One more recommendation: shellcheck.net is good at spotting common scripting mistakes, so I recommend running your scripts through it for suggestions.

Answer 5

Based on your edit, you need only compare if "$f" is equal to "$dataPath/" to detect and avoid printing the "$dataPath" directory. (actually using !=) Continuing from your example (and incorporating all the comments about not using for i inls anything`...), you could do:
#!/bin/bash
shopt -s globstar ## enable globstar
[ -z "$1" ] && { ## validate at least 1 argument provided
printf "error: insufficient input\nusage: %s path\n" "${0##*/}" >&2
exit 1
}
datapath="$1" ## set datapath
[ -d "$datapath" ] || { ## validate argument is a directory
printf "error: invalid path - not a directory.\n" >&2
exit 1;
}
## output absolute file/directory names
for f in "$datapath"/**; do ## find files & subdirs below datapath
if [ -d "$f" ]; then ## am I a directory that isn't datapath
[ "$f" != "$datapath/" ] && printf "directory: %s\n" "$f"
elif [ -f "$f" ]; then ## am I a file?
printf "filename : %s\n" "$f"
else ## am I neither a file or directory?
printf "unknown : %s\n" "$f"
fi
done
Now if you only want the relative filenames below "$dataPath", you simply need to trim "dataPath/" from the beginning of each filename using the parameter expansion ${parameter#[word]} (where [word] expands to the pattern you want to match, e.g. "$dataPath/" here):
printf "\nwith relative path\n\n"
## output relative file/directory names
for f in "$datapath"/**; do
relpath="${f#$datapath/}" ## trim $datapath/ from f
if [ -d "$f" ]; then
[ -n "$relpath" ] && printf "directory: %s\n" "$relpath"
elif [ -f "$f" ]; then
printf "filename : %s\n" "$relpath"
else
printf "unknown : %s\n" "$relpath"
fi
done
Example including both above on the following directory structure:
Example Directory
$ tree ~/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr
/home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr
├── chkpass.c
├── dat
│   ├── pw
│   ├── users.bin
│   ├── users.bin.sav
│   └── users.txt
├── getpass.c
├── getpass.h
├── readuserdb.c
├── sha256d.c
├── sha256d.h
├── sha256dtst.c
├── sha256fread.c
├── sha256fread_timed.c
└── userdb.c
Example Script Use/Output
Including both absolute and relative paths, you would have:
$ bash ~/scr/utl/filelist.sh ~/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr
filename : /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/chkpass.c
directory: /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/dat
filename : /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/dat/pw
filename : /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/dat/users.bin
filename : /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/dat/users.bin.sav
filename : /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/dat/users.txt
filename : /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/getpass.c
filename : /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/getpass.h
filename : /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/readuserdb.c
filename : /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/sha256d.c
filename : /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/sha256d.h
filename : /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/sha256dtst.c
filename : /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/sha256fread.c
filename : /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/sha256fread_timed.c
filename : /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/userdb.c
with relative path
filename : chkpass.c
directory: dat
filename : dat/pw
filename : dat/users.bin
filename : dat/users.bin.sav
filename : dat/users.txt
filename : getpass.c
filename : getpass.h
filename : readuserdb.c
filename : sha256d.c
filename : sha256d.h
filename : sha256dtst.c
filename : sha256fread.c
filename : sha256fread_timed.c
filename : userdb.c
(note: the output of directory: /home/david/dev/src-c/tmp/tst/sha2dcr/ is suppressed in both cases)
Look things over and let me know if you have further questions.
(note: I use all lower-case variable names if you have an unexplained copy error...)