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I have a parent folder named "parent_folder" with a lot of subfolders, in these subfolders is a file named "foo.mp4".

I can find these files easily by doing this:

mymacbook:parent_folder username$ find ./ -name "foo.mp4" -exec echo {} \;

Now that returns the path of each file, relative to parent_folder/

./path/to/foo.mp4

How can i return just the path, without the filename?

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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dubbelj
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    man find (ACTIONS): -printf %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 ".". – Costas Jan 23 '15 at 10:32
  • Could you show an example of that? Should I put that behind '-exec' or before? – dubbelj Jan 23 '15 at 10:36
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    find ./ -name "foo.mp4" -printf "%h\n" will print path to for each found file (one by line). More over as usual nobody use -exec echo {} therefore there is -print (default even omitted) or printf action. – Costas Jan 23 '15 at 10:45
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    @Costas, -printf is GNU-only. The OP's mentioning OS/X (a BSD system). – Stéphane Chazelas Jan 23 '15 at 11:07
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    @StéphaneChazelas Thanks. I didn't know such limitation for OS/X (BSD). Poor poor mac' users! – Costas Jan 23 '15 at 11:11

2 Answers2

33

With GNU find:

find . -name foo.mp4 -printf '%h\n'

With other finds, provided directory names don't contain newline characters:

find . -name foo.mp4 |
  LC_ALL=C sed 's|/[^/]*$||'

Or:

find . -name foo.mp4 -exec dirname {} \;

though that means forking a process and running one dirname command per file.

If you need to run a command on that path, you can do (standard syntax):

find . -name "featured.mp4" -exec sh -c '
  for file do
    dir=${file%/*}
    ffmpeg -i "$file" -c:v libvpx -b:v 1M -c:a libvorbis "$dir" featured.webm
  done' sh {} +

Though in this case, you may be able to use -execdir (a BSD extension also available in GNU find), which chdir()s to the file's directory:

find . -name "featured.mp4" -execdir \
  ffmpeg -i {} -c:v libvpx -b:v 1M -c:a libvorbis . featured.webm \;

Beware though that while the GNU implementation of find will expand {} to ./filename here, BSD ones expand to filename. It's OK here as the filename is passed as argument to an option and is always featured.mp4 anyway, but for other usages you may have to take into account that the file name may start with - or + (and be understood as an option by the command) or contain = (and be understood as a variable assignment by awk for instance), or other characters causing this kind of problem with perl -p/n (not all of them fixed by GNU find's ./ prefix though in that case), etc.

Stéphane Chazelas
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0

Below command can also be used to fetch just the directory details.

find ./ -name "foo.mp4" | rev | cut -d"/" -f2- | rev
Jeff Schaller
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Sekar Ramu
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