bash: how to display the name of the first directory that contains a certain file
Question
I have this:
ls */file
dir1/file dir2/file dir3/file
But I need just the first directory name, like this: dir1
I did this:
IFS="/" read foo bar <<< "$(ls */file 2>/dev/null)"
echo $foo
dir1
And it works, but now I have a problem with subshell
expansion over ssh
. Is there a more elegant way (without subshells
or sed
) to do this?
If not, I'll then post a question regarding a completely different issue - expanding subshells
over ssh
.
Solution
for F in */file; do
D=${F%%/*}
break
done
Another:
F=(*/file); D=${F%%/*}
OTHER TIPS
Try
ls */file | cut -d"/" -f1
Use /
as a separator.
You can use the tricky Double quotes! Like so:
LIST=`ls */file`
echo "$LIST" | cut -d/ -f1
or
echo "$LIST" | awk -F/ {'print $1'}
You can use builtin read bulletin with -d
option:
read -d '/' a < <(echo */file)
echo "$a"
dir1
If you just need the name of the folder you can use :
$ls -1 | awk 'NR==n'
Where n=1
is the first directory, you can change the value of n
to get the nth Directory.
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