107

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

Radu Rădeanu
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JorgeeFG
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10 Answers10

109

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"
GcL
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dessert
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40

Try something like:

find "$(cd ..; pwd)" -name "filename"
Scrutinizer
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30

The simplest way is

find "$(pwd -P)" -name "filename"
Vivek
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27

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.

Sylvain Pineau
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13

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
DawnSong
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Wyrmwood
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5

Try this way:

find $PWD -name "filename"
BeastOfCaerbannog
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Lakmal Dissanayaka
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3

Unless I totally misunderstand, it is as simple as this:

find $(realpath .) -name 'river.jpg'

By specifying the full real path as a start, find will implicitly output this full path as a search result.

The bash command realpath converts the current (or any other directory as ./images) into its real path). the $(realpath .) converts the output to a variable, as if it was typed manually, e.g. /home/myusername

anonymous2
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Pelton
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2

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

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

Alejandro Galera
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1

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

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.

Sir_Dippingsauce
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