How to get all files under a specific directory in

Question

I need to get all those files under D:\dic and loop over them to further process individually.

Does MATLAB support this kind of operations?

It can be done in other scripts like PHP,Python...

Answer 1

I don't know a single-function method for this, but you can use genpath to recurse a list of subdirectories only. This list is returned as a semicolon-delimited string of directories, so you'll have to separate it using strread, i.e.

dirlist = strread(genpath('/path/of/directory'),'%s','delimiter',';')

If you don't want to include the given directory, remove the first entry of dirlist, i.e. dirlist(1)=[]; since it is always the first entry.

Then get the list of files in each directory with a looped dir.

filenamelist=[];
for d=1:length(dirlist)
    % keep only filenames
    filelist=dir(dirlist{d});
    filelist={filelist.name};

    % remove '.' and '..' entries
    filelist([strmatch('.',filelist,'exact');strmatch('..',filelist,'exact'))=[];
    % or to ignore all hidden files, use filelist(strmatch('.',filelist))=[];

    % prepend directory name to each filename entry, separated by filesep*
    for f=1:length(filelist)
        filelist{f}=[dirlist{d} filesep filelist{f}];
    end

    filenamelist=[filenamelist filelist];
end

filesep returns the directory separator for the platform on which MATLAB is running.

This gives you a list of filenames with full paths in the cell array filenamelist. Not the neatest solution, I know.

Answer 2

You're looking for dir to return the directory contents.

To loop over the results, you can simply do the following:

dirlist = dir('.');
for i = 1:length(dirlist)
    dirlist(i)
end

This should give you output in the following format, e.g.:

name: 'my_file'
date: '01-Jan-2010 12:00:00'
bytes: 56
isdir: 0
datenum: []