How to echo directories containing matching file w

Question

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.

Answer 1

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 ".".

Answer 2

GNU find

find /root_path -type f -iname "*.class" -printf "%h\n" | sort -u

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

find / -name *.class -printf '%h\n' | sort --unique

Answer 6

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.