The above is perfectly fine for small directories, but in general the preferred way to loop over files is with find: find . ! -name . -prune

The above is perfectly fine for small directories, but in general the preferred way to loop over files is with find: find . ! -name . -prune \ -exec grep -qE 'wav|draft' {} \; \ -exec "${action}" \; ; Edit: I missed the herestring in the original code, so the above is wrong as mentioned in the comments; if your find has regex, you can use it to save one grep: find . ! -name . -prune \ -regex '.*wav.*\|.*draft.*' \ -exec "${action}" \; ; Otherwise you can call sh to printf the filename into a grep. However, the point of my post is that find can perform seek, filter and execute, and should be used for all three unless it is really impossible (which is unlikely).