Question

In a shell script how would I find a file by a particular name and then navigate to that directory to do further operations on it?

From here I am going to copy the file across to another directory (but I can do that already just adding it in for context.)

Answer 1

You can use something like:

cd -- "$(dirname "$(find / -type f -name ls | head -1)")"

This will locate the first ls regular file then change to that directory.

In terms of what each bit does:

• The find will start at / and search down, listing out all regular files (-type f) called ls (-name ls). There are other things you can add to find to further restrict the files you get.
• The | head -1 will filter out all but the first line.
• $() is a way to take the output of a command and put it on the command line for another command.
• dirname can take a full file specification and give you the path bit.
• cd just changes to that directory, the -- is used to prevent treating a directory name beginning with a hyphen from being treated as an option to cd.

If you execute each bit in sequence, you can see what happens:

pax[/home/pax]> find / -type f -name ls
/usr/bin/ls

pax[/home/pax]> find / -type f -name ls | head -1
/usr/bin/ls

pax[/home/pax]> dirname "$(find / -type f -name ls | head -1)"
/usr/bin

pax[/home/pax]> cd -- "$(dirname "$(find / -type f -name ls | head -1)")"

pax[/usr/bin]> _