Find files recursively in Emacs Lisp

By Jeff Kreeftmeijer on 2023-02-28 (originally published on 2023-02-27)

To find files recursively in Emacs Lisp, use the directory-files-recursively.¹ The first argument is the directory the recursive search starts and the second is a regular expression that matches file basenames.

Listing 1: Find all Org files in the current directory and its subdirectories.

(directory-files-recursively "." "\\.org$")

("./sub/two.org" "./one.org")

The optional third and fourth arguments allow for including directories and following symlinks.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Contents-of-Directories.html ↩︎