walk-sync

What is walk-sync?

The walk-sync npm package is designed to provide a simple and efficient way to recursively list all files and directories within a given directory, similar to the Unix 'find' command. It is particularly useful for tasks involving file system traversal, such as building file trees, indexing project files, or performing batch operations on multiple files.

What are walk-sync's main functionalities?

Basic Directory Listing

This feature allows you to list all files and directories within a specified directory. The result is an array of strings, each representing a path relative to the initial directory.

const walkSync = require('walk-sync');
const paths = walkSync('path/to/directory');
console.log(paths);

Directory Listing with Options

This feature enhances the basic directory listing by allowing you to specify options such as excluding directories from the output or filtering files by glob patterns. This is useful for more targeted file system operations.

const walkSync = require('walk-sync');
const options = { directories: false, globs: ['**/*.js'] };
const paths = walkSync('path/to/directory', options);
console.log(paths);

Directory Listing with Entry Objects

This feature returns detailed information about each file and directory in the form of entry objects, including properties like size and relativePath. This is useful for applications that need more information about file system entries than just their paths.

const walkSync = require('walk-sync');
const options = { directories: true, includeBasePath: true, entries: true };
const entries = walkSync('path/to/directory', options);
entries.forEach(entry => {
  console.log(entry.relativePath, entry.size);
});

Other packages similar to walk-sync

glob

The 'glob' package provides pattern matching functionality to filter files in the file system. It is similar to walk-sync in its ability to traverse directories, but it focuses more on matching files against specified patterns rather than listing all files.

readdirp

Similar to walk-sync, 'readdirp' allows for recursive directory listing with a focus on streaming the results. It offers a more event-driven approach, making it suitable for scenarios where processing large directories without blocking the event loop is important.

fast-glob

This package is an alternative to walk-sync that emphasizes performance and supports multiple patterns for file matching. 'fast-glob' is designed for speed and efficiency, making it a good choice for projects requiring fast file searching capabilities.

README

node-walk-sync

Return an array containing all recursive files and directories under a given directory, similar to Unix find. Follows symlinks. Bare-bones, but very fast.

Similar to wrench.readdirSyncRecursive, but adds trailing slashes to directories.

Not to be confused with node-walk, which has both an asynchronous and a synchronous API.

Installation

yarn add walk-sync

Usage

const walkSync = require('walk-sync');
const paths = walkSync('project')

Given project/one.txt and project/subdir/two.txt, paths will be the following array:

['one.txt', 'subdir/', 'subdir/two.txt']

Directories come before their contents, and have a trailing forward-slash (on all platforms).

Symlinks are followed.

Entries

Sometimes, it is important to get additional information from a walk of a directory; for instance if the downstream consumer needs to stat the files we can leverage the stats from the walk.

To accommodate, walkSync.entries(path [, options]) is also provided, instead of returning a list of files and/or directories it returns an array of objects which correspond to a given file or directory, except with more data.

entry.relativePath
entry.mode  // => fs.statSync(fullPath).mode
entry.size  // => fs.statSync(fullPath).size
entry.mtime // => fs.statSync(fullPath).mtime.getTime()

entry.isDirectory() // => true if directory

Options

• globs: An array of globs. Only files and directories that match at least one of the provided globs will be returned.

  const paths = walkSync('project', { globs: ['subdir/**/*.txt'] });
  // => ['subdir/two.txt']
  

  As an alternative to string globs, you can pass an array of precompiled minimatch.Minimatch instances. This is faster and allows to specify your own globbing options.

• directories (default: true): Pass false to only return files, not directories:

  const paths = walkSync('project', { directories: false })
  // => ['one.txt', 'subdir/two.txt']
  

• ignore: An array of globs. Files and directories that match at least one of the provided globs will be pruned while searching.

  const paths = walkSync('project', { ignore: ['subdir'] })
  // => ['one.txt']
  

  As an alternative to string globs, you can pass an array of precompiled minimatch.Minimatch instances. This is faster and allows to specify your own globbing options.

• includeBasePath (default: false): Pass true to include the basePath in the output. note: this flag is only for walkSync(..) not walkSync.entries(..)

   const paths = walkSync('project', { includeBasePath: true });
   // => ['project/one.txt', 'project/subdir/two.txt']
  

• fs: Allows an alternative implementation of fs to be supplied. examples of alternative file systems include memfs or graceful-fs

   import {Volume, createFsFromVolume} from 'memfs'
   const fs = createFsFromVolume(Volume.fromJSON({'aDir/aFile': 'some-contents'}))
   const paths = walkSync('project', { fs });
   // => ['aDir/', 'aDir/aFile']
  

• globOptions: Pass any options for Minimatch that will be applied to all items in globs and ignore that are strings.

  If items in globs or ignore are instances of minimatch.Minimatch, the globOptions will not be applied.

Background

walkSync(baseDir) is a faster substitute for

glob.sync('**', {
  cwd: baseDir,
  dot: true,
  mark: true,
  strict: true
})

Changelog

3.0.0

• [BREAKING] drop node 8
• upgrade all deps
• move to GH Actions
• [Bugfix] handle EPERM from windows filesystems correctly