Path is added multiple times to result array unexpectedly

March 4, 2024

I am on macOS, and for the sake of being able to debug with VS Code, I installed bash 4 via homebrew.

I am developing a script that is supposed to result in an array of all files of a certain path.

My issue is that with a certain folder tree I am testing it, one file 3 levels deep gets added 4 times even though it exists only once. I am sure I am overlooking something that I cannot see…

Here’s the tree

.
├── fetchProjects.sh
├── foo
│   └── bar
│       └── buzz
│           └── foo.file
├── test1
└── test2

Here’s the script …:

#!/opt/homebrew/bin/bash

declare -a files=()

fetch_folder_content () {
    echo "Current path is: $1"
    subfolders="$(ls $1)"
    echo "Relative paths are: $subfolders"
    for subfolder in $subfolders; do
        declare -a subfolders=()
        this_path="$1/$subfolder"
        echo "This path: $this_path"
        if test -d $this_path; then
            fetch_folder_content $this_path
        fi
        if test -f $this_path; then
            echo "Appending $subfolder
     to array"
            files[${#files[@]}]=$this_path
        fi
    done
}

fetch_folder_content "."

echo "Found files:"
for file in "${files[@]}"; do
    echo "$file"
done

… resulting in the following array:

Found files:
./fetchProjects.sh
./foo/bar/buzz/foo.file
./foo/bar/buzz/foo.file
./foo/bar/buzz/foo.file
./foo/bar/buzz/foo.file
./test1
./test2

>Solution :

Use the globstar option to recursively walk a directory.

shopt -s globstar

files=()

for f in ./**/*; do
    test -f "$f" && files+=("$f")
done

As you are on macOS, if you use zsh instead, you can filter non-regular files using the glob directory (and you don’t need to explicitly enable the recursive glob **):