Bash – ny way to prevent find from digging down recursively into subdirectories

bashkshshellunix

When I do:

$ find /

It searches the entire system.
How do I prevent that?

(This question comes from an "answer" to another question.)

Best Solution

G'day,

Just wanted to expand on the suggestion from Jon to use -prune. It isn't the easiest of find options to use, for example to just search in the current directory the find command looks like:

find . \( -type d ! -name . -prune \) -o \( <the bit you want to look for> \)

this will stop find from descending into sub-directories within this directory.

Basically, it says, "prune anything that is a directory, whose name isn't ".", i.e. current dir."

The find command evals left to right for each item found in the current directory so after completion of the first element, i.e. the prune segment, it will then continue on with the matched item in your second -o (OR'd) expression.

HTH.

cheers, Rob

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Bash – How to get the source directory of a Bash script from within the script itself

#!/usr/bin/env bash

SCRIPT_DIR="$( cd -- "$( dirname -- "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" &> /dev/null && pwd )"

is a useful one-liner which will give you the full directory name of the script no matter where it is being called from.

It will work as long as the last component of the path used to find the script is not a symlink (directory links are OK). If you also want to resolve any links to the script itself, you need a multi-line solution:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

SOURCE="${BASH_SOURCE[0]}"
while [ -h "$SOURCE" ]; do # resolve $SOURCE until the file is no longer a symlink
  DIR="$( cd -P "$( dirname "$SOURCE" )" >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd )"
  SOURCE="$(readlink "$SOURCE")"
  [[ $SOURCE != /* ]] && SOURCE="$DIR/$SOURCE" # if $SOURCE was a relative symlink, we need to resolve it relative to the path where the symlink file was located
done
DIR="$( cd -P "$( dirname "$SOURCE" )" >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd )"

This last one will work with any combination of aliases, source, bash -c, symlinks, etc.

Beware: if you cd to a different directory before running this snippet, the result may be incorrect!

Also, watch out for $CDPATH gotchas, and stderr output side effects if the user has smartly overridden cd to redirect output to stderr instead (including escape sequences, such as when calling update_terminal_cwd >&2 on Mac). Adding >/dev/null 2>&1 at the end of your cd command will take care of both possibilities.

To understand how it works, try running this more verbose form:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

SOURCE="${BASH_SOURCE[0]}"
while [ -h "$SOURCE" ]; do # resolve $SOURCE until the file is no longer a symlink
  TARGET="$(readlink "$SOURCE")"
  if [[ $TARGET == /* ]]; then
    echo "SOURCE '$SOURCE' is an absolute symlink to '$TARGET'"
    SOURCE="$TARGET"
  else
    DIR="$( dirname "$SOURCE" )"
    echo "SOURCE '$SOURCE' is a relative symlink to '$TARGET' (relative to '$DIR')"
    SOURCE="$DIR/$TARGET" # if $SOURCE was a relative symlink, we need to resolve it relative to the path where the symlink file was located
  fi
done
echo "SOURCE is '$SOURCE'"
RDIR="$( dirname "$SOURCE" )"
DIR="$( cd -P "$( dirname "$SOURCE" )" >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd )"
if [ "$DIR" != "$RDIR" ]; then
  echo "DIR '$RDIR' resolves to '$DIR'"
fi
echo "DIR is '$DIR'"

And it will print something like:

SOURCE './scriptdir.sh' is a relative symlink to 'sym2/scriptdir.sh' (relative to '.')
SOURCE is './sym2/scriptdir.sh'
DIR './sym2' resolves to '/home/ubuntu/dotfiles/fo fo/real/real1/real2'
DIR is '/home/ubuntu/dotfiles/fo fo/real/real1/real2'

Bash – How to iterate over a range of numbers defined by variables in Bash

for i in $(seq 1 $END); do echo $i; done

edit: I prefer seq over the other methods because I can actually remember it ;)

Best Solution

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Bash – How to get the source directory of a Bash script from within the script itself

Bash – How to iterate over a range of numbers defined by variables in Bash

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