How to echo directories containing matching file with Bash?

Grundlefleck_4120 0
Viewed 31443

I want to write a bash script which will use a list of all the directories containing specific files. I can use find to echo the path of each and every matching file. I only want to list the path to the directory containing at least one matching file.

For example, given the following directory structure:

dir1/
    matches1
    matches2
dir2/
    no-match

The command (looking for 'matches*') will only output the path to dir1.

As extra background, I'm using this to find each directory which contains a Java .class file.

find grep shell command-line bash
7 Answers
find . -name '*.class' -printf '%h\n' | sort -u

From man find:

-printf format

%h Leading directories of file’s name (all but the last element). If the file name contains no slashes (since it is in the current directory) the %h specifier expands to ".".

user_685870

GNU find

find /root_path -type f -iname "*.class" -printf "%h\n" | sort -u
user_1315270 
find / -name *.class -printf '%h\n' | sort --unique
user_2739030

How about this?

find dirs/ -name '*.class' -exec dirname '{}' \; | awk '!seen[$0]++'

For the awk command, see #43 on this list

user_20896750
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