Ubuntu – How to check whether a file is in current directory or its subdirectories

bashscripts

I use find to search for files in a directory or its subdirectories.
find . -iname '*.csv', and it gives me the following output

./2012/t1.csv
./2012/t2.csv
./2013/t1.csv

Now, I want to check in a script whether the file t1.csv is in the current folder or in one of the subdirectories. If it's in a subdirectory, my script should descend to that directory.
How can I do that?

Best Answer

To check only for t1.csv, you can use:

find . -name 't1.csv'

Now, to go in the first directory where t1.csv file is found, you can use:

cd $(dirname $(find . -name 't1.csv' 2>/dev/null | head -1)  2>/dev/null)

enter image description here

Related Solutions

Bash – Fix Filenames with Spaces Breaking For Loop and Find Command

Using for with find is the wrong approach here, see for example this writeup about the can of worms you are opening.

The recommended approach is to use find, while and read as described here. Below is an example that should work for you:

find . -type f -name '*.*' -print0 | 
while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do
    printf '%s\n' "$file"
done

This way you delimit the filenames with null (\0) characters, this means that variation in space and other special characters will not cause problems.

In order to update an archive with the files that find locates, you can pass its output directly to tar:

find . -type f -name '*.*' -printf '%p\0' | 
tar --null -uf archive.tar -T -

Note that you do not have to differentiate between if the archive exists or not, tar will handle it sensibly. Also note the use of -printf here to avoid including the ./ bit in the archive.

Ubuntu – Find file by matching on its path

try this

find */subdir -type f

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Fix Filenames with Spaces Breaking For Loop and Find Command

Ubuntu – Find file by matching on its path

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