Shell – Get the latest directory (not the latest file)

When you change a file's metadata (permissions, ownership, timestamps, …), you aren't changing the directory, you're changing the file's inode. This requires the x permission on the directory (to access the file), and ownership of the file (only the user who owns the file can change its permissions).

I think this is intuitive if you remember that files can have hard links in multiple directories. The directory contains a table that maps file names to inodes. If a file is linked under multiple names in multiple directories, that's still one inode with one set of permissions, ownership, etc., which shows that the file's metadata is in the inode, not in the directory.

Creating, renaming, moving or deleting a file involves modifying the directory, so it requires write permission on the directory.

Just add a -prune so that the found directories are not descended into:

find . -type d -path '*/wp-content/plugins/*' -prune -print

You need to quote that *wp-content/plugins/* as it's also a shell glob.

If you want only the directory names as opposed to their full path, with GNU find, you can replace the -print with -printf '%f\n' or assuming the file paths don't contain newline characters, pipe the output of the above command to awk -F / '{print $NF}' or sed 's|.*/||' (also assuming the file paths contain only valid characters).

With zsh:

printf '%s\n' **/wp-content/plugins/*(D/:t)

**/ is any level of subdirectories (feature originating in zsh in the early nighties, and now found in most other shells like ksh93, tcsh, fish, bash, yash though generally under some option), (/) to select only files of type directory, D to include hidden (dot) ones, :t to get the tail (file name).