Looping over files and directories in Bash Scripting - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Looping over files and directories

📖 Scenario: You are organizing files in a folder on your computer. You want to list all the files and directories inside it to see what is there.

🎯 Goal: Create a bash script that loops over all files and directories in the current folder and prints their names.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a variable holding the list of files and directories

Create a variable to count the number of items

Use a for loop to go through each item

Print each item name

Print the total count of items

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Listing files and directories is a common task when managing files on your computer or server. Automating this helps save time and avoid mistakes.

💼 Career

Many IT and DevOps jobs require writing scripts to handle files and directories efficiently. This skill is foundational for automation tasks.

1

Create a variable with all files and directories

Create a variable called items that holds the list of all files and directories in the current folder using ls command.

Bash Scripting

# Create a variable called items with the list of files and directories
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use $(ls) to get the list of files and directories.

2

Create a counter variable

Create a variable called count and set it to 0 to count the number of items.

Bash Scripting

items=$(ls)
# Create a variable called count and set it to 0
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Set count=0 to start counting from zero.

3

Loop over each item and count

Use a for loop with variable item to go through each item in items. Inside the loop, print the item and increase count by 1.

Bash Scripting

items=$(ls)
count=0
# Use a for loop with item to go through items
# Print item and increase count by 1
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use for item in $items; do ... done to loop. Use echo "$item" to print. Use count=$((count + 1)) to add one.

4

Print the total count of items

After the loop, print the total number of items using echo and the count variable.

Bash Scripting

items=$(ls)
count=0
for item in $items; do
    echo "$item"
    count=$((count + 1))
done
# Print the total count of items
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use echo "Total items: $count" to show the count.