UNIX For Loop through Files in Directory

Sometimes I want to do a particular task to each file in a directory using a UNIX shell script, but for some reason I can never remember the correct syntax to do so.  Here is a quick example bash script to loop through all files of a particular extension in a directory and do an action with the filenames.

	#!/bin/bash
	for filename in `ls /path/to/directory/*.tar.gz`; do
	tar -zxvf $filename *.txt
	done

view raw bash_directory_loop.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The above example loops through all .tar.gz files in the directory and extracts any text file within those files.