Yep, that would work, but I guess my question was a bit poorly formulated. I am writing a bash script that has: dirs=[^.]*/ and I'd like to have "files=..." without using find or other external commands if at all possible. Thanks.
Actually that last one wasn't ideal. A better solution would be ls -lAR / | grep "^-" This would give you files, not symbolic links, not directories, not block devices, not character devices. I can't find any way to do it with ls alone. Of course the best way is with the find command, being find / -type f which will not only give you the file names, but with their complete path. If you want the files listed in long format, then use find / -type f -ls By the way the syntax you have to list directories does not work for me. It yields the same results as if I did ls *, which lists all files in the current directory, and files in directories contained in the current directory (in lieu of listing the directory name). Any reason why you'd rather use ls instead of find? Thanks, Jacques