How to only get file name with Linux find

Question

I m using find to all files in directory  so I get a list of paths  However  I need only file names  i e  I get   dir1 dir2 file txt and I want to get file txt

User · Answer

If you want to run some action against the filename only, using basename can be tough.

For example this:

find ~/clang+llvm-3.3/bin/ -type f -exec echo basename {} \;

will just echo basename /my/found/path. Not what we want if we want to execute on the filename.

But you can then xargs the output. for example to kill the files in a dir based on names in another dir:

cd dirIwantToRMin;
find ~/clang+llvm-3.3/bin/ -type f -exec basename {} \; | xargs rm

User · Answer

Use -execdir which automatically holds the current file in     for example  find   -type f -execdir echo           You can also use  PWD instead of    on some systems it won t produce an extra dot in the front   If you still got an extra dot  alternatively you can run  find   -type f -execdir basename             -execdir utility  argument        The -execdir primary is identical to the -exec primary with the exception that utility will be executed from the directory that holds the current file   When used   instead of    then    is replaced with as many pathnames as possible for each invocation of utility  In other words  it ll print all filenames in one line

User · Answer

If your find doesn t have a -printf option you can also use basename     find   dir1 -type f -exec basename

User · Answer

In GNU find you can use -printf parameter for that  e g    find  dir1 -type f -printf   f n

User · Answer

Honestly basename and dirname solutions are easier  but you can also check this out    find   -type f   grep -oP            or  find   -type f   rev   cut -d     -f1   rev   or  find   -type f   sed  s

User · Answer

-exec and -execdir are slow  xargs is king     alias f  time find  Applications -name    app  -type d -maxdepth 5     f -exec basename         wc -l    f -execdir echo         wc -l    f -print0   xargs -0 -n1 basename   wc -l    f -print0   xargs -0 -n1 -P 8 basename   wc -l    f -print0   xargs -0 basename   wc -l       139     0m01 17s real     0m00 20s user     0m00 93s system      139     0m01 16s real     0m00 20s user     0m00 92s system      139     0m01 05s real     0m00 17s user     0m00 85s system      139     0m00 93s real     0m00 17s user     0m00 85s system      139     0m00 88s real     0m00 12s user     0m00 75s system   xargs s parallelism also helps   Funnily enough i cannot explain the last case of xargs without -n1  It gives the correct result and it s the fastest               basename takes only 1 path argument but xargs will send them all  actually 5000  without -n1   does not work on linux and openbsd  only macOS      Some bigger numbers from a linux system to see how -execdir helps  but still much slower than a parallel xargs     alias f  time find  usr  -maxdepth 5 -type d    f -exec basename         wc -l    f -execdir echo         wc -l    f -print0   xargs -0 -n1 basename   wc -l    f -print0   xargs -0 -n1 -P 8 basename   wc -l  2358     3 63s real     0 10s user     0 41s system 2358     1 53s real     0 05s user     0 31s system 2358     1 30s real     0 03s user     0 21s system 2358     0 41s real     0 03s user     0 25s system

User · Answer

If you are using GNU find  find   -type f -printf   f n    Or you can use a programming language such as Ruby 1 9      ruby -e  Dir         each  x  puts File basename x      If you fancy a bash  at least 4  solution  shopt -s globstar for file in     do echo   file       done

User · Answer

As others have pointed out  you can combine find and basename  but by default the basename program will only operate on one path at a time  so the executable will have to be launched once for each path  using either find     -exec or find       xargs -n 1   which may potentially be slow   If you use the -a option on basename  then it can accept multiple filenames in a single invocation  which means that you can then use xargs without the -n 1  to group the paths together into a far smaller number of invocations of basename  which should be more efficient   Example   find  dir1 -type f -print0   xargs -0 basename -a   Here I ve included the -print0 and -0  which should be used together   in order to cope with any whitespace inside the names of files and directories   Here is a timing comparison  between the xargs basename -a and xargs -n1 basename versions    For sake of a like-with-like comparison  the timings reported here are after an initial dummy run  so that they are both done after the file metadata has already been copied to I O cache    I have piped the output to cksum in both cases  just to demonstrate that the output is independent of the method used     time sh -c  find  usr lib -type f -print0   xargs -0 basename -a   cksum  2532163462 546663  real    0m0 063s user    0m0 058s sys 0m0 040s    time sh -c  find  usr lib -type f -print0   xargs -0 -n 1 basename   cksum   2532163462 546663  real    0m14 504s user    0m12 474s sys 0m3 109s   As you can see  it really is substantially faster to avoid launching basename every time

User · Answer

On mac  BSD find  use   find  dir1 -type f -exec basename

User · Answer

I ve found a solution  on makandracards page   that gives just the newest file name    ls -1tr     tail -1    thanks goes to Arne Hartherz   I used it for cp   cp   ls -1tr     tail -1   tmp

[linux] How to only get file name with Linux 'find'?

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