'Bash How to find directories of given files

I have a folder with several subfolders and in some of those subfolders I have text files example_1.txt, example_2.txt and so on. example_1.txt may be found in subfolder1, some subfolders do not contain text files.

How can I list all directories that contain a text file starting with example?

I can find all those files by running this command

find . -name "example*"

But what I need to do is to find the directories these files are located in? I would need a list like this subfolder1, subfolder4, subfolder8 and so on. Not sure how to do that.

linuxbash


Solution 1:[1]

You must be use the following command,

find . -name "example*" | uniq -u | awk -F / '{print $2}'

Solution 2:[2]

  • find all files in subfolders with mindepth 2 to avoid this folder (.)
  • get dirname with xargs dirname
  • sort output-list and make folders unique with sort -u
  • print only basenames with awk (delimiter is / and last string is $NF). add "," after every subfolder
  • translate newlines in blanks with tr
  • remove last ", " with sed
list=$(find ./ -mindepth 2 -type f -name "example*"|xargs dirname|sort -u|awk -F/ '{print $NF","}'|tr '\n' ' '|sed 's/, $//')

echo $list

flow, over, stack

Solution 3:[3]

Suggesting find command that prints only the directories path.

Than sort the paths.

Than remove duplicates.

find . -type f -name "example*" -printf "%h\n"|sort|uniq

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Robert
Solution 2
Solution 3 Dudi Boy

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