The best way to find directories that exactly match a string irrespective of the path

command linedirectoryfind

Suppose I have the directories:

/foo/
/A/B/C/foo/D/E/
/F/foo/G/H/foo/I/

How can get a result that lists all the directories whose basename exactly matches
a given string (for example foo in here)?

/foo/
/A/B/C/foo/
/F/foo/
/F/foo/G/H/foo/

Best Answer

You can use find:

$ find / -type d -name foo -print

Related Solutions

Where does the pattern occur in a match by find

The pattern given to -name has to match the entire base filename. The behaviour of the -name pattern is defined as:

The primary shall evaluate as true if the basename of the current pathname matches pattern

This means it's true when the whole of the basename matches the pattern you gave. You can think of a pattern as being basically like a shell glob: you can use *, ?, and [...] patterns inside it, with the start and end of the pattern aligned with the start and end of the string.

So your command:

find ~ -name bookmarks

finds files named "bookmarks" because that is the entire filename, but:

find ~ -name bookmark

would only find files named 'bookmark', because there are no wildcard characters in the pattern.

To match files called both bookmark and bookmarks, you could use:

find ~ -name 'bookmark*'

So if you want to find

those files whose names contain bookmark regardless the position of bookmark in the filename

you can use use:

find ~ -name '*bookmark*'

to match files whose names have any number of characters, then bookmark, then any number of characters.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Where does the pattern occur in a match by find

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