Print the directory where the 'find' linux command finds a match

Question

I have a bunch of directories; some of them contain a \'.todo\' file.

/storage/BCC9F9D00663A8043F8D73369E920632/.todo
/storage/BAE9BBF30CCEF5210534E875FC80D37E/.         


        

Answer 1

To print the directory name only, use -printf '%h\n'. Also recommended to quote your variable with doublequotes.

find "$STORAGEFOLDER" -name .todo -printf '%h\n'

If you want to process the output:

find "$STORAGEFOLDER" -name .todo -printf '%h\n' | xargs ls -l

Or use a loop with process substitution to make use of a variable:

while read -r DIR; do
    ls -l "$DIR"
done < <(exec find "$STORAGEFOLDER" -name .todo -printf '%h\n')

The loop would actually process one directory at a time whereas in xargs the directories are passed ls -l in one shot.

To make it sure that you only process one directory at a time, add uniq:

find "$STORAGEFOLDER" -name .todo -printf '%h\n' | uniq | xargs ls -l

Or

while read -r DIR; do
    ls -l "$DIR"
done < <(exec find "$STORAGEFOLDER" -name .todo -printf '%h\n' | uniq)

If you don't have bash and that you don't mind about preserving changes to variables outside the loop you can just use a pipe:

find "$STORAGEFOLDER" -name .todo -printf '%h\n' | uniq | while read -r DIR; do
    ls -l "$DIR"
done

Answer 2

The quick and easy answer for stripping off a file name and showing only the directory it’s in is dirname:

#!/bin/bash
STORAGEFOLDER='/storage'
find "$STORAGEFOLDER" -name .todo  -exec dirname {} \;