What is recursive behavior command in UNIX?

Answer 1

There a lot of command that could be used with recursive option in UNIX type operating systems and even Windows. For example we want to list of files and folders inside current folder but we want to list and all subfolder and even subsubfolders and etc. For this we will have to use recursive option.

Example:

Command: ls -laR

Return:

-rw-r--r--@ 1 david staff 373 Bal 26 18:13 add.sh

-rw-r--r-- 1 david staff 31 Bal 26 18:12 even.txt

drwxr-xr-x 3 david staff 102 Kov 20 18:46 ruby

drwxr-xr-x 2 david staff 68 Bal 15 07:24 C

./folder:

total 0

drwxr-xr-x 2 david staff 68 Bal 26 16:55 .

drwxr-xr-x 16 david staff 544 Bal 26 18:11 ..

./ruby:

total 8

drwxr-xr-x 3 david staff 102 Kov 20 18:46 .

drwxr-xr-x 16 david staff 544 Bal 26 18:11 ..

-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 david staff 181 Kov 20 18:59 test.rb

As you can see it not only listed files from active directory, but also listed and files from other two directories that are located in active directory.

There are many programs that allows this kind of recursion (usually it will be -R option) and some even will allow to limit the depth you want. In order to find out which commands support recursive option you need to read each command manual pages, which could be in internet or in system by writing in console: man