Matlab list all files in subfolders of the same name...

Hi, all:

My file/directory structure is as follows:

tests

----dir1

--------sweep

------------results.txt

----dir2

--------sweep

------------results.txt

----dir3

--------sweep

------------results.txt

...

----dirN

--------sweep

------------results.txt

I'd love to list all "results.txt" in all subfolders named "sweep". As you may have noticed, dir1, dir2, ... dirN are different.

Can anybody give me a hand? Thanks...

Cheers Pei

[Paulo Silva]

what have you done so far in order to do what you want?

Answer 1

[the cyclist]

ls */sweep/results.txt

[Pei JIA]

Tried, but failed. Thanks anyway...

[Ashish Uthama]

This should have worked if you were in the 'tests' directory.

[the cyclist]

When you say it "failed", do you mean it gave an error, or an unexpected result? I am very confident that you should be able to get the "ls" command to do what you want.

[Walter Roberson]

Perhaps JIA needs the specific

ls tests/*/sweep/results.txt

[Pei JIA]

I'm able to "ls" in Matlab (under Windows), but with the command you suggested, I only got an error message as follows:

>> ls */sweep/results.txt

*\sweep\results.txt not found.

>> dir */sweep/results.txt

*\sweep\results.txt not found.

>>

I tried "ls */sweep/results.txt" under bash in Linux (not in the workspace from a Linux Matlab ) and it works fine. However, I don't have a licensed Linux Matlab so I can't test the command here. However, anyway, under Windows Matlab, I can't do with the above command.

Any further suggestions?

[Fangjun Jiang]

I wonder if you tried the which command. The addpath() command adds all your folder and subfolder into MATLAB path temporarily. The which command should tell you all the files found.

[Pei JIA]

Thanks very much.

Either genpath(pwd) doesn't work,

or genpath(pwd) is extremely slow.

Now, 5 minutes passed, nothing happend and genpath(pwd) just kept hanging there in Matlab working space.

[Fangjun Jiang]

That is weird. Do you have lots of sub-folders under \tests\? It works slow for me too but it took 2 seconds to generate a path string totaling 77k characters. Anyway, hope you know the function genapth(), addpath() and which() now.

Answer 2

[Fangjun Jiang]

addpath(genpath(pwd));
which results.txt -all

or, function format of which()

files=which('results.txt','-all');

Answer 3

[Walter Roberson]

See my answer in the similar Question http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/12233-finding-a-string-in-a-file

Answer 4

[Pierre]

Unfortunately I'm not allowed to post my solution to a similar problem, but I can roughly summerize my approach: I made a function which looks like

   myRecursiveDir(root, varargin);

and in your case you would call it like

   myRecursiveDir('tests', 'dir*', 'sweep', 'results.txt');

The method then recursively fetches the list of directories/files at each level with the dir command and returns the composed filenames.

Hope this might help.

[Fangjun Jiang]

I am curious to know why the built-in function genpath() and which() can not do the job. Thanks!

[Pierre]

Well, depending on the structure of your directory-tree, the number or files/folders besides the ones you want walk-through, and the frequence you query for files, genpath() becomes quite inefficient, as the size of your list of file names grows exponentially in terms of searching depth.

In our case it was definitely worth the effort to invest a quarter of an hour to implement that kind of 'guided' search.

But you are right, genpath() should work for less complex and huge directory trees. When I first read your answer I only remembered 'genpath is not suitable' (it's been a while since we were faced to that issue), I'm sorry for that. ;)

Answer 5

[Oleg Komarov]

Try rdir:

rdir('C:\tests\**\sweep\results.txt')