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JorgeeFG
Asked: 2014-04-08 07:37:31 +0800 CST

Get absolute path of files using 'find' command

  • 772

Is there a way to get absolute path of a file that is being searched?

For example:

find .. -name "filename"

It gives me results like ../filename but I want the full path.

What I need is to find in the parent directory and its children, for a specific file, that I will use in another script later.

Thanks

command-line

10 Answers

  1. You can use bash's Tilde Expansion to get the absolute path of the current working directory, this way find prints the absolute path for the results as well:

    find ~+ -type f -name "filename"

    If executed in ~/Desktop, this is expanded to

    find /home/yourusername/Desktop -type f -name "filename"

    and prints results like:

    /home/yourusername/Desktop/filename

    If you want to use this approach with the current working directory’s parent directory you need to cd before calling find:

    cd .. && find ~+ -type f -name "filename"
    • 57
  2. Best Answer

    Try something like:

    find "$(cd ..; pwd)" -name "filename"
    • 32

  3. The simplest way is

    find "$(pwd -P)" -name "filename"
    • 23

  4. Try using the -exec option of find:

    find .. -name "filename" -exec readlink -f {} \;

    Note: readlink prints the value of a symbolic link or canonical file name.

    • 22

  5. This worked for me, but will only return the first occurrence.

    realpath $(find . -type f -name filename -print -quit)

    To get full paths for all occurrences (as suggested by Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy)

    find . -type f -name filename -print0 | xargs -0 realpath
    • 6

  6. Try this way:

    find $PWD -name "filename"
    • 2

  7. Also using PWD can show you the full directory. Pwd will show you all your directorys you are in like the expanding of filename. Hope this helped.

    • 1

  8. Removing last directory component with parameter Expansion.

    find "${PWD%/*}" -name 'filename'

    An example of how you can use mapfile to save output from find to an indexed array for later use.

    mapfile -t -d '' < <(find ${PWD%/*} -name 'filename' -print0)

    (if no array name is specified, MAPFILE will be the default array name).

    for i in "${MAPFILE[@]}"; do
    echo "$((n++)) $i"
done
    • 1

  9. Try with -printf. This also works with files with blank spaces.

    find .. -name "filename" -printf $PWD/"%f\n"

    • 0

  10. chaining through realpath:

    find . -iname "\.gitignore" | xargs realpath
    • 0