Go to parent directory inline

Question

I was wondering if it's possible to go to parent directory of a file inline. I know I could type cd .. and it would. However, what if I wanted do something like echo $(find . -name “xyz.png”).. and it would return the parent directory of the file instead of the path to file. Or instead of a file I search for a folder, and want to return path to the parent directory.

Answer 1

You could use dirname to strip off the last part of a path. Combined with find in your examples it would give you just the parent directory of whatever was found. You could use that in cd as in cd $(find -name "xyz.png" | xargs dirname) if that's the sort of thing you're trying to do.

You can also use the -type d option to find to have it only find directories if you want to match directory names instead of filenames.

Answer 2

UNTESTED:

  function dirs_ofFile
  {
      find -name "$1" | xargs dirname 
  }

then

$ cd $(dirs_ofFile xyz.png | sed 1q)   # in case there is more than one.