How to write the result of a complex command to a file in Bash

Question

I need to find files with *test* in their name, get their path and save them to a file. Here is the code:

find . -name *test* | xargs -I % bash -x "echo ''; readlink -f % '';"

It's working correctly, but I don't know how to write results to a file. printf "above code" >> result.txt is not working.

What do I need to change? Or is there any way to write this in a simpler way?

Answer 1

find . -name *test* | xargs -I % bash -x "echo ''; readlink -f % '';" > file.txt

Answer 2

The redirection is added to the end of the command, no need to try and wrap it in printf or similar:

find . -name *test* | xargs -I % bash -x "echo ''; readlink -f % '';" >> result.txt

This doesn't work, however, as the quoting in the bash -x command is off. I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve exactly, but I think it could be simplified to

find . -name '*test*' | xargs -I% readlink -f % >> result.txt

Notice that I've quoted '*test*' to make sure it's not expanded by the shell before find gets to see it.

Instead of find | xargs find | xargs , you could use find -exec :

find . -name '*test*' -exec readlink -f {} + >> result.txt

This has the advantage of calling readlink as few times as possible.

And finally, if you don't actually care about resolving symlinks (and hidden files ¹ ), but just need canonical paths, you could do it without external tools:

shopt -s globstar    # Requires Bash 4.0 or newer
printf "$PWD/%s\n" **/*test* >> result.txt

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¹ If you do care about hidden files, you can use shopt -s dotglob to find them. If it is possible that there is no match at all, you can use shopt -s nullglob to avoid writing **/*test* literally to the result file.