How can I find all of the directories that contain one or more files?

Question

I have a hierarchy of directories. Some directories do not contain files and they only contain other directories. Some contain files.

For example:

- movies
  - 2022
    - action
      - movie.mp4
      - another-movie.mp4
  - 2023
    - drama
      - movie2.mp4
  - 2024
    - thriller
      - movie3.mp4
    - movie4.mp4

I want a find command that would provide this result:

/movies/2022/action
/movies/2023/drama
/movies/2024
/movies/2024/thriller

I read this and this and this, but I could not figure out a find command.

Update: A directory can have files and directories in it. I updated the question. For example in the 2024 I have a movie and another directory. The result should contain both /movies/2024 and /movies/2024/thriller directories.

Answer 1

Find the files of type regular and print the enclosing directory. Unique the list to ensure each directory is listed only once. If on a GNU system, that can be done reliably even in the presence of file paths containing newline characters with:

find /path -type f -print0 |
    LC_ALL=C sed -z 's!/[^/]*$!!' |
    LC_ALL=C sort -zu |
    tr '\0' '\n'

Standardly and assuming file paths don't contain newline characters:

find /path -type f -print |
    LC_ALL=C sed 's!/[^/]*$!!' |
    LC_ALL=C sort -u

Answer 2

Simply,

find movies -type f -print | \
    xargs -r dirname | \
    sort --uniq

Read man find xargs dirname sort.

Here's an explanation:

• find outputs a list of all the files, and their directories, e.g. /movies/2022/action/movie.mp4 /movies/2022/action/another-movie.mp4 ... to STDOUT.
• xargs packs as many filenames as will fit (see xargs --show-limits </dev/null), and repeatedly executes dirname until xargs runs out of filenames.
• dirname chops off the righmost / and the filename. E.g. /movies/2022/action/movie.mp4 becomes /movies/2022/actionand /movies/2022/action/another-movie.mp4 also becomes /movies/2022/action/
• sort --unique eliminates duplicate directory names.

This structure (find, xargs, post-process) is useful for many tasks. Put some effort into understanding it.

Answer 3

This should do it:

find /movies -type d -not -empty -links 2

To quote this answer:

The number of links is the number of hard links to the file. For a directory, the number of hard links is the number of (immediate) subdirectories plus the parent directory and itself.

So when the number of links is 2, there is only the parent directory (..) and itself (.), hence no subdirectories.

---

While this answer worked for the original question, it doesn't work for the later updated question anymore. I'll still leave it, as it might be helpful for others.

Answer 4

With zsh:

print -rC1 -- **/*(NDFe['()(($#)) $REPLY/*(ND.Y1)'])

Would print raw on 1 Columnt the Full (non-empty) directories that contain at least 1 file that can be determined to be a regular file (.), including Dot files (hidden ones).

Replace . with -. to also take into account symlinks eventually resolving to regular files, or ^/ for files of any type except directory or -^/ for that check to be done after symlink resolution. Remove the first D to not consider hidden directories and/or the second to not consider hidden files in those directories.

Answer 5

Disclaimer: I'm the current author of rawhide (rh) (see github.com/raforg/rawhide).

With rawhide (rh) you can do:

rh /movies 'd && !empty && "[ -n \"$(rh -ref -- %S)\" ]".sh'

/movies is a path to search.

The rest is the search criteria:

d means it's a directory.

!empty means it's not empty. This isn't needed but it makes it faster by reducing the number of shell processes created by the next bit.

"[ -n \"$(rh -ref -- %S)\" ]".sh runs the shell command [ -n "$(rh -ref -- %S)" ] which checks if there are any regular files in the candidate directory (with a nested use of rh).

rh -ref -- %S is short for rh -r -e f -- %S.

The -r is like find's -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 to only search one level down.

The -e f specifies the search criteria expression f which matches regular files.

The -- stops command line option parsing so as to prevent any malicious filenames from being interpreted as options to rh (e.g. -xreboot) (thanks Stéphane).

The %S is the name of the current candidate directory that the nested rh needs to search.

The [ -n ... ] tests that the nested rh command produced some output (i.e., that it found some regular files in the candidate directory).