Where does the pattern occur in a match by find

find

The manpage of find says:

-name

Base of file name (the path with the leading directories
removed)

$ find ~ -name bookmark | less

returns nothing, while

$ find ~ -name bookmarks | less
./.streamtuner/cache/bookmarks
./.config/zathura/bookmarks
./.elinks/bookmarks

has three matches.

Why does the first not have the matches of the second?

If I would like to find those files whose names contain bookmark regardless the position of bookmark in the filename, how should I use find? Thanks.

Best Answer

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.

Using grep

Why can't you just use the -r switch to grep to recurse the filesystem instead of making use of find? There are 2 additional switches I'd use too, instead of the -n switch.

$ grep -rHn PATTERN <DIR> | cut -d":" -f1-2

Example #1

$ grep -rHn PATH ~/.bashrc | cut -d":" -f1-2
/home/saml/.bashrc:25

Details

-r - recursively search through files + directories
-H - prints the name of the file if it matches (less restrictive than -l) i.e. it works with grep's other switches
-n - display the line number of the match

Example #2

$ grep -rHn PATH ~/.bash* | cut -d":" -f1-2
/home/saml/.bash_profile:10
/home/saml/.bash_profile:12
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:99
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:101
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:118
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:166
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:218
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:250
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:314
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:2317
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:2323
/home/saml/.bashrc:25

Using find

$ find . -exec sh -c 'grep -Hn PATTERN "$@" | cut -d":" -f1-2' {}  +

Example

$ find ~/.bash* -exec sh -c 'grep -Hn PATH "$@" | cut -d":" -f1-2' {}  +
/home/saml/.bash_profile:10
/home/saml/.bash_profile:12
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:99
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:101
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:118
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:166
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:218
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:250
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:314
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:2317
/home/saml/.bash_profile_askapache:2323
/home/saml/.bashrc:25

If you truly want to use find you can do something like this to exec grep upon finding the files using find.

Command-Line – Get List of Subdirectories Containing a File with Specific String

find . -type f -name '*f*' | sed -r 's|/[^/]+$||' |sort |uniq

The above finds all files below the current directory (.) that are regular files (-type f) and have f somewhere in their name (-name '*f*'). Next, sed removes the file name, leaving just the directory name. Then, the list of directories is sorted (sort) and duplicates removed (uniq).

The sed command consists of a single substitute. It looks for matches to the regular expression /[^/]+$ and replaces anything matching that with nothing. The dollar sign means the end of the line. [^/]+' means one or more characters that are not slashes. Thus, /[^/]+$ means all characters from the final slash to the end of the line. In other words, this matches the file name at the end of the full path. Thus, the sed command removes the file name, leaving unchanged the name of directory that the file was in.

Simplifications

Many modern sort commands support a -u flag which makes uniq unnecessary. For GNU sed:

find . -type f -name '*f*' | sed -r 's|/[^/]+$||' |sort -u

And, for MacOS sed:

find . -type f -name '*f*' | sed -E 's|/[^/]+$||' |sort -u

Also, if your find command supports it, it is possible to have find print the directory names directly. This avoids the need for sed:

find . -type f -name '*f*' -printf '%h\n' | sort -u

More robust version (Requires GNU tools)

The above versions will be confused by file names that include newlines. A more robust solution is to do the sorting on NUL-terminated strings:

find . -type f -name '*f*' -printf '%h\0' | sort -zu | sed -z 's/$/\n/'