Find file in list of directories piped from output of other command

Question

I need to find location of a file. I don't want to search entire system, and I know that the file I am looking for is in a directory related to a certain package.

So I would like to do find dir -name "filename" > find.out on every dir that is returned from the command dpkg -L package_name .

How do I do that? I think piping and xargs would be useful but I don't know how to tell xargs to be the dir to lookup in the find command.

Answer 1

find $(dpkg -L package_name) -name "filename" > find.out

Answer 2

You can do:

#!/bin/bash
readarray -t DIRS < <(exec dpkg -L package_name)  ## Store file list to an array.
find "${DIRS[@]}" -name "filename" > find.out  ## Search all at once.

Run with

bash script.sh

Or perhaps do it with just one line anyway:

readarray -t DIRS < <(exec dpkg -L package_name); find "${DIRS[@]}" -name "filename" > find.out