Getting only the subfolders of a directory

João Marabisa

Hello Community,

Recently there was a request from an user who wanted to get the subfolders (and only them) within a certain directory. Generally speaking people want to get the list with files given a certain extension - for example thinking about '.xlsx', it can be simply obtained by using:

xlsx_files = dir('*xlsx');

But how to get the subfolders? Below there is a simple solution that is totally general, working in any directory and without loops:

files = dir(); %Listing of the current directory files dirFlags = [files.isdir]; %Selecting directories indexes in the structure subFoldersC = files(find(dirFlags)); %Selecting only the directories in the structure subFoldersStruct = subFoldersC(3:end); %Deleting '.' and '..' directories subFoldersCell = struct2cell(subFoldersStruct); %Converting structure to cell data subFoldersCell = subFoldersCell(4,:) %Getting a cell of desired subfolders

Generally speaking I prefer to work with cells, but if the user wants a structure itself, the clean solution stops at the fourth line - subFoldersStruct is enough (please don't forget to use '.name' to access it then). Thanks @Roberta Varela  for the talk. 

Hope it helps.

getsubfolders.oml

Roberta Varela_20843

@João Marabisa,

Thank you for sharing this tip.

Working with cells after we retrieve the output of dir function is always more convenient, because the structs are accessed in different ways depending on the number of foldes that we have. For example:

• Only one folder is found: struct cannot be accessed with indices, naturally, and the command to retrieve the folder name would simply be yourstruct.name
• When more than one folder is found: struct should be accessed with indices, such as yourstruct(idx).name

Which makes me need to create an if-condition if I need to go through the whole list of folders:

for i = 1:length(yourstruct)

    if length(yourstruct) == 1

        blablabla = yourstruct.name

    else

        blablabla = yourstruct(i).name

    end

end

Regards,

Roberta