How to only find files in a given directory, and ignore subdirectories using bash

Question

I'm running the find command to find certain files, but some files in sub-directories have the same name which I want to ignore.

I'm interested in files/patterns like this:

/dev/abc-scanner, /dev/abc-cash ....

The command:

find /dev/ -name 'abc-*'

What's being returned:

/dev/abc-scanner
/dev/abc-cash
...
...
...
/dev/.udev/names/abc-scanner
/dev/.udev/names/abc-cash

I want to ignore the latter files: /dev/.udev/...

Answer 1

If you just want to limit the find to the first level you can do:

 find /dev -maxdepth 1 -name 'abc-*'

... or if you particularly want to exclude the .udev directory, you can do:

 find /dev -name '.udev' -prune -o -name 'abc-*' -print

Answer 2

Is there any particular reason that you need to use find ? You can just use ls to find files that match a pattern in a directory.

ls /dev/abc-*

If you do need to use find , you can use the -maxdepth 1 switch to only apply to the specified directory.

Answer 3

这可能会做你想做的：

find /dev \( ! -name /dev -prune \) -type f -print

Answer 4

I got here with a bit more general problem - I wanted to find files in directories matching pattern but not in their subdirectories.

My solution (assuming we're looking for all cpp files living directly in arch directories):

find . -path "*/arch/*/*" -prune -o -path "*/arch/*.cpp" -print

I couldn't use maxdepth since it limited search in the first place, and didn't know names of subdirectories that I wanted to exclude.

Answer 5

find /dev -maxdepth 1 -name 'abc-*'

Does not work for me. It return nothing. If I just do '.' it gives me all the files in directory below the one I'm working in on.

find /dev -maxdepth 1 -name "*.root" -type 'f' -size +100k -ls

Return nothing with '.'instead I get list of all 'big' files in my directory as well as the rootfiles/ directory where I store old ones.

Continuing. This works.

find ./ -maxdepth 1 -name "*.root" -type 'f' -size +100k -ls
564751   71 -rw-r--r--   1 snyder   bfactory   115739 May 21 12:39 ./R24eTightPiPi771052-55.root
565197  105 -rw-r--r--   1 snyder   bfactory   150719 May 21 14:27 ./R24eTightPiPi771106-2.root
565023   94 -rw-r--r--   1 snyder   bfactory   134180 May 21 12:59 ./R24eTightPiPi77999-109.root
719678   82 -rw-r--r--   1 snyder   bfactory   121149 May 21 12:42 ./R24eTightPiPi771098-10.root
564029  140 -rw-r--r--   1 snyder   bfactory   170181 May 21 14:14 ./combo77v.root

Apparently /dev means directory of interest. But ./ is needed, not just . . The need for the / was not obvious even after I figured out what /dev meant more or less.

I couldn't respond as a comment because I have no 'reputation'.

Answer 6

There is an alternative to find called rawhide (rh) and it's much easier to use. Instead of:

find /dev -maxdepth 1 -name 'abc-*'

You can do:

rh -r /dev '"abc-*"'

The -r is the same as "-m1 -M1" which is the same as find's "-mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1", just a lot shorter.

Rawhide (rh) is available from https://raf.org/rawhide or https://github.com/raforg/rawhide . It works at least on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, macOS, and Cygwin.