How to list dirs containg a file?

Question

I'm trying to use find to list dirs with a certain file inside, but my dirs have spaces so I haven't found a solution.

Answer 1

Assuming I'm really understanding your question, have you tried:

find / -name "*what*" -exec dirname {} \;

This works for me even if my directories have spaces:

root:~# find / -name "*what*" -exec dirname {} \;
/usr/share/man/id/man1
...
...
/usr/share/man/ja/man1
/usr/share/man/it/man1
/usr/share/man/man1
/usr/bin
/root/This is a Spaced Dir

Answer 2

This is from the fedora .bashrc file:

ff () {
       find . -name "*$@*" -print;
       }

Add this to your .bashrc and then reinitialize your bash shell

now you can use ff <whatever > \ <whatever>

The \ is the escape sequence to escape special characters.

Answer 3

POSIX dictates a rather weak find (seriously, it doesn't even have -print0). Likewise, xargs won't have an -0 option, and IEEE 1003.1-2008 considers xargs -I {} to be an X/Open System Interface extension (which both declares a string to substitute with arguments and converts xargs to using newlines for input argument separators). Thus, assuming you actually want to do something with the path names other than printing them out and if you can only use base POSIX, you'll need to escape the spaces in the strings before passing them to xargs, thus:

find /startingdir -name 'file name' -exec dirname {} \; | sed 's/ /\\ /g' | xargs command

Note that you'll also need to escape quotes and backslashes, if you have directories that include these. This could replace the sed command:

sed -e 's/\\/\\\\/' -e 's/ /\\ /g' -e 's/"/\\"/g' -e "s/'/\\\\'/g"

(Note the extra backslashes on the double quoted script. Single quote strings use backslashes literally, but double quote strings will interpret backslashes, thus your shell will interpret "\\\\" as \\ which sed needs for a literal \, while '\\\\' is interpreted as \\\\ which sed needs for a literal \\.) This will escape existing backslashes first, then escape spaces, double quotes and single quotes.

If you can use the X/Open System Interface extensions, then the first version (no quotes or backslashes) simplifies to:

find /startingdir -name 'file name' -exec dirname {} \; | xargs -I {} command {}

If you have quotes and backslashes in your directory names, these will still need to be escaped as above (but without escaping spaces).

Either way, if you have newlines in your directory names, then you've got bigger problems than I can help with.

Edited to remove bash version, cleaned up based on input from Dennis Williamson

Answer 4

zsh is not my preferred shell, but for this task its **-function is invincible:

zsh -c "'ls **/'the file name'"

Or even:

zsh -c "ls **/*'file name'"