Use bash to find first folder name that contains a

Question

I would like to do this in Bash:

• in the current directory, find the first folder that contains "foo" in the name

I've been playing around with the find command, but a little confused. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You can use the -quit option of find:

find <dir> -maxdepth 1 -type d -name '*foo*' -print -quit

Answer 2

for example:

dir1=$(find . -name \*foo\* -type d -maxdepth 1 -print | head -n1)
echo "$dir1"

or (For the better shell solution see Adrian Frühwirth's answer)

for dir1 in *
do
    [[ -d "$dir1" && "$dir1" =~ foo ]] && break
    dir1=        #fix based on comment
done
echo "$dir1"

or

dir1=$(find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -print | grep 'foo' | head -n1)
echo "$dir1"

Edited head -n1 based on @ hek2mgl comment

Next based on @chepner's comments

dir1=$(find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -print | grep -m1 'foo')

or

dir1=$(find . -name \*foo\* -type d -maxdepth 1 -print -quit)

Answer 3

pattern="foo"
for _dir in *"${pattern}"*; do
    [ -d "${_dir}" ] && dir="${_dir}" && break
done
echo "${dir}"

This is better than the other shell solution provided because

• it will be faster for huge directories as the pattern is part of the glob and not checked inside the loop
• actually works as expected when there is no directory matching your pattern (then ${dir} will be empty)
• it will work in any POSIX-compliant shell since it does not rely on the =~ operator (if you need this depends on your pattern)
• it will work for directories containing newlines in their name (vs. find)