List all Files in an S3 Bucket with AWS CLI

# Table of Contents

# List all Files in an S3 Bucket with AWS CLI

To list all of the files of an S3 bucket with the AWS CLI, use the s3 ls command, passing in the --recursive parameter.

shell

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aws s3 ls s3://YOUR_BUCKET --recursive --human-readable --summarize

list all files in bucket

The output of the command shows the date the objects were created, their file size and their path.

List requests are associated with a cost. At the time of writing, the cost of 1,000 list requests is $0.005 in the us-east-1 region.

The parameters we passed to the s3 ls command are the following:

Name	Description
recursive	performs the command on all files under the set prefix
human-readable	displays the file sizes in human-readable format
summarize	displays the total number of objects and their total size

If you only want to list all top-level objects, remove the --recursive parameter from the command.

# List all Files in a Folder of an S3 Bucket

To list all files, located in a folder of an S3 bucket, use the s3 ls command, passing in the entire path to the folder and setting the --recursive parameter.

shell

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aws s3 ls s3://YOUR_BUCKET/YOUR_FOLDER/ --recursive --human-readable --summarize

list all files in bucket folder

The output of the command only shows the files in the /my-folder-1 directory.

# List only the Filenames of an S3 Bucket

To only list the filenames of an S3 bucket, we have to:

Use the s3api list-objects command.
Set the --output parameter to text.
Use the --query parameter to filter the output of the command.

shell

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aws s3api list-objects --bucket YOUR_BUCKET --output text --query "Contents[].{Key: Key}"

only list filenames of bucket

The output of the command shows all the filenames, or in other words, path names in the S3 bucket.

To list only the filenames in a specific folder, add the --prefix parameter to the command:

shell

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aws s3api list-objects --bucket YOUR_BUCKET --prefix "my-folder/" --output text --query "Contents[].{Key: Key}"

only list filenames in folder

We can also redirect the output to a file on the local file system:

shell

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aws s3api list-objects --bucket YOUR_BUCKET --prefix "my-folder-1/" --output text --query "Contents[].{Key: Key}" > file-names.txt

list filenames redirect output

# Additional Resources

You can learn more about using AWS S3 by checking out the following tutorials:

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List all Files in an S3 Bucket with AWS CLI

# Table of Contents