How do I return only file names from the find command?

I'm looking to get a list of just file names (without the rest of the path) when executing the find command from a terminal. How do I accomplish this on the mac?

0

7 Answers

With basename:

find . -type f -exec basename {} \;

4

Evilsoup mentioned that what was posted doesn't work for spaced file names. So instead you could use:

find . -type f -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' filename; do echo ${filename##*/}; done

2

With GNU find, you can do:

 find ~/tmp/ -printf "%f\n"

This is probably worth trying in OS X too.

3

There is a better way to strip everything but the last portion of a file path; with awk. It is better because awk is not executed once for every file. In some cases this matters.

find ~/tmp/ -type f | awk -F/ '{ print $NF }'

We look only for files in ~/tmp and we get a list where every entry is separated by slashes. Hence, we use a slash as the field separator (-F/) and print the field parameter ($1..$9) that corresponds to the last field ($NF).

2

EDIT:

Using sed:

$ find . -type f | sed 's/.*\///'

---

Using the xargs command, as mentioned in the response of @nerdwaller

$ find . -type f -print0 | xargs --null -n1 basename

3

You can call sh from within find's -exec option and avoid using uneccesary pipes. This also has the advantage that you don't need to worry about funny filenames (spaces, newlines, etc.):

find . -type f -exec sh -c 'echo "${0##*/}"' {} \;

What about this:

find … | egrep -o -e '[^/]+$'

Advantage: Only exactly one additional process is spawned, not one for each result.

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