Get list of subdirectories which contain a file whose name contains a string

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Method 1

find . -type f -name '*f*' | sed -r 's|/[^/]+$||' |sort |uniq

The above finds all files below the current directory (.) that are regular files (-type f) and have f somewhere in their name (-name '*f*'). Next, sed removes the file name, leaving just the directory name. Then, the list of directories is sorted (sort) and duplicates removed (uniq).

The sed command consists of a single substitute. It looks for matches to the regular expression /[^/]+$ and replaces anything matching that with nothing. The dollar sign means the end of the line. [^/]+' means one or more characters that are not slashes. Thus, /[^/]+$ means all characters from the final slash to the end of the line. In other words, this matches the file name at the end of the full path. Thus, the sed command removes the file name, leaving unchanged the name of directory that the file was in.

Simplifications

Many modern sort commands support a -u flag which makes uniq unnecessary. For GNU sed:

find . -type f -name '*f*' | sed -r 's|/[^/]+$||' |sort -u

And, for MacOS sed:

find . -type f -name '*f*' | sed -E 's|/[^/]+$||' |sort -u

Also, if your find command supports it, it is possible to have find print the directory names directly. This avoids the need for sed:

find . -type f -name '*f*' -printf '%hn' | sort -u

More robust version (Requires GNU tools)

The above versions will be confused by file names that include newlines. A more robust solution is to do the sorting on NUL-terminated strings:

find . -type f -name '*f*' -printf '%h' | sort -zu | sed -z 's/$/n/'

Simplified using dirname

Imagine needing the command in a script where command will be in single quotes, escaping sed command is painful and less than ideal, so replace with dirname.

Issues regard special chars and newline are also mute if you did not need to sort or directories names are not affected.

find . -type f -name "*f*" -exec dirname "{}" ; |sort -u

take care of newline issue:

find . -type f -name "*f*" -exec dirname -z "{}" ; |sort -zu |sed -z 's/$/n/'

Method 2

Why not try this:

find / -name '*f*' -printf "%hn" | sort -u

Method 3

There are essentially 2 methods you can use to do this. One will parse the string while the other will operate on each file. Parsing the string use a tool such as grep, sed, or awk is obviously going to be faster but here’s an example showing both, as well as how you can “profile” the 2 methods.

Sample data

For the examples below we’ll use the following data

$ touch dir{1..3}/dir{100..112}/file{1..5}
$ touch dir{1..3}/dir{100..112}/nile{1..5}
$ touch dir{1..3}/dir{100..112}/knife{1..5}

Delete some of the *f* files from dir1/*:

$ rm dir1/dir10{0..2}/*f*

Approach #1 – Parsing via strings

Here we’re going to use the following tools, find, grep, and sort.

$ find . -type f -name '*f*' | grep -o "(.*)/" | sort -u | head -5
./dir1/dir103/
./dir1/dir104/
./dir1/dir105/
./dir1/dir106/
./dir1/dir107/

Approach #2 – Parsing using files

Same tool chain as before, except this time we’ll be using dirname instead of grep.

$ find . -type f -name '*f*' -exec dirname {} ; | sort -u | head -5
./dir1/dir103
./dir1/dir104
./dir1/dir105
./dir1/dir106
./dir1/dir107

NOTE: The above examples are using head -5 to merely limit the amount of output we’re dealing with for these examples. They’d normally be removed to get your full listing!

Comparing the results

We can use time to take a look at the 2 approaches.

dirname

real        0m0.372s
user        0m0.028s
sys         0m0.106s

grep

real        0m0.012s
user        0m0.009s
sys         0m0.007s

So it’s always best to deal with the strings if possible.

Alternative string parsing methods

grep & PCRE

$ find . -type f -name '*f*' | grep  -oP '^.*(?=/)' | sort -u

sed

$ find . -type f -name '*f*' | sed 's#/[^/]*$##' | sort -u

awk

$ find . -type f -name '*f*' | awk -F'/[^/]*$' '{print $1}' | sort -u

Method 4

Here’s one I find useful:

find . -type f -name "*somefile*" | xargs dirname | sort | uniq

Method 5

You can use the -exec switch to run dirname and get the directory name instead of the file name. This has the added benefit of being POSIX compatible.

find . -name "*file*" -exec dirname {} ;

Method 6

This answer is shamelessly based on slm answer. It was an interesting approach, but it has a limitation if the file and/or directory names had special chars (space, semi-column…). A good habit is to use find /somewhere -print0 | xargs -0 someprogam.

Sample data

For the examples below we’ll use the following data

mkdir -p dir{1..3}/dir {100..112}
touch dir{1..3}/dir {100..112}/nile{1..5}
touch dir{1..3}/dir {100..112}/file{1..5}
touch dir{1..3}/dir {100..112}/kni fe{1..5}

Delete some of the *f* files from dir1/*/:

rm dir1/dir 10{0..2}/*f*

Approach #1 – Parsing using files

$ find -type f -name '*f*' -print0 | sed -e 's#/[^/]*x00#x00#g' | sort -zu | xargs -0 -n1 echo | head -n5
./dir1/dir 103
./dir1/dir 104
./dir1/dir 105
./dir1/dir 106
./dir1/dir 107

NOTE: The above examples are using head -5 to merely limit the amount of output we’re dealing with for these examples. They’d normally be removed to get your full listing! also, replace the echowhich whatever command you want to use.

Method 7

With zsh:

typeset -aU dirs # array with unique values
dirs=(**/*f*(D:h))

printf '%sn' $dirs

Method 8

I’ve found this variation that doesn’t use sort or unique usefull

find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -I{} find {} -maxdepth 1 -iname '*.log' -print -quit

The advantage is that you don’t have to wait for the whole tree to be traversed before sorted.

Find all directories find . -type d -print0
For each directory | xargs -0 -I{}, find a file in the current directory -maxdepth 1 that matches the pattern -iname '*.log' (case insensitive). If found, print the filename -print and stop traversing that directory quit

Alternatively

find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -I// find // -maxdepth 1 -iname '*.log' -exec dirname {} ; -quit

which just prints the parent directories name, as inspired by Snowbuilders answer.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0

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