I want to write a bash script which will use a list of all the directories containing specific files. I can use find
to echo the path of each and every matching file. I only want to list the path to the directory containing at least one matching file.
For example, given the following directory structure:
dir1/
matches1
matches2
dir2/
no-match
The command (looking for 'matches*'
) will only output the path to dir1
.
As extra background, I'm using this to find each directory which contains a Java .class file.
find -name '*.class' -printf '%h\n' | sort -u
From man find
:
-printf
format
%h
Leading directories of file’s name (all but the last element). If the file name contains no slashes (since it is in the current directory) the %h
specifier expands to "."
.
On OS X and FreeBSD, with a find
that lacks the -printf
option, this will work:
find . -name *.class -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 dirname | sort --unique
The -n1
in xargs
sets to 1 the maximum number of arguments taken from standard input for each invocation of dirname
GNU find
find /root_path -type f -iname "*.class" -printf "%h\n" | sort -u
Ok, i come way too late, but you also could do it without find, to answer specifically to "matching file with Bash" (or at least a POSIX shell).
ls */*.class | while read; do
echo ${REPLY%/*}
done | sort -u
The ${VARNAME%/*}
will strip everything after the last /
(if you wanted to strip everything after the first, it would have been ${VARNAME%%/*}
).
Regards.
find / -name *.class -printf '%h\n' | sort --unique
Far too late, but this might be helpful to future readers:
I personally find it more helpful to have the list of folders printed into a file, rather than to Terminal (on a Mac).
For that, you can simply output the paths to a file, e.g. folders.txt, by using:
find . -name *.sql -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 dirname | sort --unique > folders.txt