When I don't remember where a file or a folder is, I sometime use the locate command (that finds more occurrences, allow more candidates than a find, in my mind. But maybe I'm mistaking). But then there's a lot of responses, of course:

locate clang

/data/sauvegardes/dev/Java/Experimentations/Angular4/bikes/node_modules/blocking-proxy/.clang-format
/data/sauvegardes/dev/Java/Experimentations/Angular4/bikes/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/tools/Xcode/Specifications/gyp.xclangspec
/data/sauvegardes/dev/Java/Experimentations/Angular6/ng6-proj/node_modules/blocking-proxy/.clang-format
/data/sauvegardes/dev/Java/Experimentations/Angular6/ng6-proj/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/tools/Xcode/Specifications/gyp.xclangspec
/data/sauvegardes/dev/Java/Experimentations/blog-demo/node/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/tools/Xcode/Specifications/gyp.xclangspec
/data/sauvegardes/dev/Java/Experimentations/blog-demo/node_modules/blocking-proxy/.clang-format
/data/sauvegardes/dev/Java/Experimentations/blog-demo/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/tools/Xcode/Specifications/gyp.xclangspec
/data/sauvegardes/dev/Java/Experimentations/ol-ext-angular/.metadata/.plugins/ts.eclipse.ide.server.nodejs.embed.win32.win32.x86_64/node-v6.9.4-win-x64/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/tools/Xcode/Specifications/gyp.xclangspec

(201 responses)

I piped this command, with dirname, sort and uniq to list only directories having such word in their name or carrying one or more file having it.

locate clang | xargs -L1 dirname | sort | uniq

it works...

/home/lebihan/dev/Java/comptes-france/metier-et-gestion/AdapterInboundWebEtude/etude/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/tools/Xcode/Specifications
/home/lebihan/dev/Java/comptes-france/metier-et-gestion/AdapterInboundWebEtude/etude/node/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/tools/Xcode/Specifications
/usr/include/boost/align/detail
/usr/include/boost/config/compiler
/usr/include/boost/predef/compiler
/usr/lib/linux-kbuild-6.1/scripts
/usr/lib/llvm-14/lib
/usr/lib/postgresql/14/lib/bitcode/postgres/commands
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
/usr/local/go/misc/ios
/usr/local/go/src/debug/dwarf/testdata
/usr/local/go/src/debug/elf/testdata
/usr/local/go/src/debug/macho/testdata
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/libclang1-14
/usr/share/doc/libclang-cpp14

(108 responses)

But does _Linux_ have a command doing the same, more easily?

#!/usr/bin/bash

install_wm() {
    echo "$(dirname "$0")"
    cd "$(dirname "$0")" && pwd
    mkdir -p /root/.config && cd /root/.config &&
    git clone https://git.suckless.org/dwm  && cd dwm && pwd &&
    diff "$(dirname "$0")/config.def.h" /root/.config/dwm
    cp -f "$(dirname "$0")/config.def.h" /root/.config/dwm &&
}

install_wm

When I run this script as root I get

.
/home/jim/CS/SoftwareDevelopment/MySoftware/Bash/ubuntu-server-LTS
Cloning into 'dwm'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 6504, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (6504/6504), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3216/3216), done.
remote: Total 6504 (delta 3733), reused 5933 (delta 3287), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (6504/6504), 6.18 MiB | 8.86 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (3733/3733), done.
/root/.config/dwm
cp: './config.def.h' and '/root/.config/dwm/config.def.h' are the same file

I run this script as root. $(dirname "$0")/config.def.h is my config file that has different content, and is located in the same directory as the script, than the one in the cloned repo. Why do I get from cp './config.def.h' and '/root/.config/dwm/config.def.h' are the same file if the files only have the same names and not the content? Also when I run diff on the two files manually, outside of the script, I get the output that shows the difference between them:

22,23c22,23
 static const char *tags[] = { "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9" };
> 
30,34c30,31
 	{ "Gimp",     NULL,       NULL,       0,            1,           -1 },
> 	{ "Firefox",  NULL,       NULL,       1  /* commands */
66,71c61
 static const char *termcmd[]  = { "st", NULL };

whereas I don't get any output when diff is run from within my script. What is happening here?

I am writing a (one-line) script which should recurse thru subdirectories. Find .txt files containing hyperlinks. Use wget to get the contents and download it in the same directory where the text file is located. Assume all text files found only contain valid hyperlinks. To test this: Create a subdirectory ./s1 Create a text file ./s1/s1.txt Contents of ./s1/s1.txt: www.google.com This is the one-liner: find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec bash -cx "wget -i \"{}\" -P $(dirname \"{}\") " \; The problem is that $(dirname \"{}\") does not expand correctly. The bash command being excuted is: + wget -i ./s1/s1.txt -P . So $(dirname \"{}\") returns . The effect is that a new **directory** ./s1/s1.txt is created. So the downloaded file is stored as ./s1/s1.txt/index.html When I replace $(dirname \"{}\") with $(echo \"{}\") the output becomes: + wget -i ./s1/s1.txt -P ./s1/s1.txt So parameter passing as such is correct. So I assume the result dirname is not properly returned to the calling bash shell. Or dirname is not evaluated at all. When I execute only the bash command bash -cx "wget -i ./s1/s1.txt -P $(dirname ./s1/s1.txt)" (so outside the find command) the command is executed as expected: + wget -i ./s1/s1.txt -P ./s1 What is the correct way to make this one-liner work?

I'm looking for a tool that I can use from a bash script that can give me the list of parent directories for a given path. e.g. given the input foo/bar/moocow I would like to get out:

foo
foo/bar
foo/bar/moocow

It would also be great if I could pipe in multiple paths, and get unique results back, e.g.:

toolimlookingfor << EOF
dir1/file1
dir1/file2
foo/bar/moocow
EOF

Output:

dir1
dir1/file1
dir1/file2
foo
foo/bar
foo/bar/moocow

dirname is close to what I'm looking for, but it only gives the immediate parent. I'm looking for the path it's self and all parents.

I have a file tree that looks like:

$ tree src
src
├── bible
│   ├── index.md
│   └── README.md
├── index.md
└── other.md

I want to render every Markdown file within this file tree to HTML via pandoc(1) -- **preserving structure**. This new file tree should be rooted at out, like so:

$ tree out
out
├── bible
│   ├── index.html
│   └── README.html
├── index.html
└── other.html

Ideally, I'd like to do this via make(1). This is what I have so far:

SRC_DIR=src
OUT_DIR=out

.PHONY: all
all: $(SRC_DIR)/*.md
	find . -name "*.md" -exec pandoc '{}' -o '{}'.html \;
	find -name "*.html" -exec bash -c 'mv {} $(OUT_DIR)/dirname {}/basename {} .md.html.html' \;
	# mv $(SRC_DIR)/*.html $(OUT_DIR)
	firefox $(OUT_DIR)/index.html

.PHONY: clean
clean:
	rm $(OUT_DIR)/*.html

This fails:

$ make
find . -name "*.md" -exec pandoc '{}' -o '{}'.html \;
find . -name "*.html" -exec bash -c 'mv {} basename {} .md.html.html' \;
mv src/*.html out
mv: cannot stat 'src/*.html': No such file or directory
make: *** [Makefile:8: all] Error 1

I would like to evaluate a basename expression given an argument from xargs. I tested:

find . -name '*.txt' | xargs -I f cp f DIR_OUT/copied_$(basename f)

which gives no file or directory because $(basename f) was not evaluated correctly. I may split it two steps: copying and changing the filename, but I would like to learn how to evaluate an expression with an argument from xargs.

This code from Stack Overflow is to get the pathname to the parent directory of a script inside the script, even if the script is run via a symlink to it: if [ -L $0 ] ; then DIR=$(dirname $(readlink -f $0)) ; else DIR=$(dirname $0) ; fi ; Is the above code equivalent to DIR=$(dirname $(readlink -f $0)) ; i.e. is there really a need to test if $0 is a symlink, and run different commands if yes and if no? Why not just use $(dirname $(readlink -f $0)) regardless of whether $0 contains symlink or not? Specifically, if $0 contains symlink, then it is perfect to use $(dirname $(readlink -f $0)). if $0 is not a symlink, then it seems perfect to me to just use $(dirname $(readlink -f $0)): - $(readlink -f $0) returns the absolute path of $0, and $(dirname $(readlink -f $0)) returns the absolute path to the parent directory of $0 - $(dirname $0) returns a path to the parent of $0, whether the return is an absolute or relative path depending on if $0 is an absolute or relative path. - I don't think whether the value of DIR is an absolute or relative path is important in the original code, because in either case, the value of DIR refers to the parent directory of $0. So are $(dirname $(readlink -f $0)) and $(dirname $0) equivalent in the original code? Thanks.

I have this: find . -type f -name '*_test.go' | xargs dirname but I get: > usage: dirname path the output of $ find . -type f -name '*_test.go' is: ./pkg_test.go ./v3/organization/organization_test.go ./v3/common/pkg_test.go ./v3/model/boil_main_test.go ./v3/model/boil_queries_test.go ./v3/model/advances_test.go ./v3/model/boil_suites_test.go ./v3/model/psql_main_test.go ./v3/model/psql_suites_test.go anyone know how I can get the dirname of the file? Maybe I need absolute paths?

xargs and basename work together as I would expect: $ printf '%s\n' foo/index.js bar/index.js baz/index.js | xargs basename index.js index.js index.js xargs and dirname, though, appear not to work together: $ printf '%s\n' foo/index.js bar/index.js baz/index.js | xargs dirname usage: dirname path I would expect foo bar baz as output. What am I missing? I'm on Darwin 18.2.0 (macOS 10.14.3).

I have a bash script here: $GOPATH/ src/ build.sh and in build.sh I have: export GOPATH="$(cd $(dirname "$BASH_SOURCE") && pwd)" is there a shorter way to get the containing dir of build.sh?

Say I have this simple bash script: #!/usr/bin/env bash file="$1"; if [ -z "$file" ]; then echo "Must pass relative file path as the first argument."; fi git_root=git rev-parse --show-toplevel; # => need to resolve file from an absolute path to relative path, relative to git root git diff HEAD:"$file" remotes/origin/dev:"$file" If I pass an absolute path to this script, it needs to be able to handle it. What is the canonical way to do that? To check if it's an absolute file path, do we just check if the first character is "/"?

I am writing a bash script to move all images into a central file. I create the list of image files with: img_fil='/home/files/img_dump.txt' locate -i image | grep \.jpg > "$img_fil" locate -i image | grep \.jpeg >> "$img_fil" locate -i image | grep \.gif >> "$img_fil" locate -i image | grep \.tif >> "$img_fil" locate -i image | grep \.png >> "$img_fil" But when I start processing the dump file for this, most of the paths contain blanks so this does not work: while read -r fline do if [ ! -e "$fline" ]; then echo "F=> $fline" mv "$fline" "$img_dir" else fpath="$(dirname $fline)" fname="$(basename $fline)" echo "F=> $fname P=> $fpath" fi done The dirname and basename always parse at the blanks so will not process right. How do I get this to work?

I just installed android-sdk using Homebrew. The path is /usr/local/Caskroom/android-sdk/3859397,26.0.1. I know I can export ANDROID_HOME with that value. How can I set it dynamically using the real path of a command such as `sdkmanager'? So far, I found $ readlink /usr/local/bin/sdkmanager /usr/local/Caskroom/android-sdk/3859397,26.0.1/tools/bin/sdkmanager How can I set $ANDROID_HOME from this value? So that I have $ANDROID_HOME=/usr/local/Caskroom/android-sdk/3859397,26.0.1 ? $ dirname readlink /usr/local/bin/sdkmanager /usr/local/Caskroom/android-sdk/3859397,26.0.1/tools/bin Now how can I append ../..?

I have this: cd $(dirname $(dirname $(dirname "$0"))) && which will cd to project root. Is there shorthand for this somehow, where I can just be like: cd 3 && # not quite, but you get the idea or whatever, I mean why not you know? Maybe a command like so would be ideal: cdx 3 && since cd has no idea that 3 is not a file or directory.