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

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

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.

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/.*\///"

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

On mac (BSD find) use:

find /dir1 -type f -exec basename {} \;

If your find doesn't have a -printf option you can also use basename:

find ./dir1 -type f -exec basename {} \;

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.

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

-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

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/