Re: recursive find in current and parent etc until an item is found

[Peng Yu]

Thanks. I will need to search the parent directory recursively. Does
this code only search whether a file is in a parent their parents,
etc., but not recursively for a given ancestor?

On 4/10/20, Bernhard Voelker <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 2020-04-10 16:09, Peng Yu wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'd like to look for a file by its name in the current directory. If
>> not found, go the the parent and look for it again. If not go up one
>> level again and look for it, ... until it is found (or until a given
>> level is reached). If the file is not found, return an error.
>>
>> The resulted path should be relative to the original current directory.
>>
>> Is there a way to do this easily with find? Thanks.
>
> Hi Peng,
>
> I'm afraid find(1) is only searching "down" the current hierarchy, but
> not "up" until "/".  However once would involve find(1) here, it would
> just be degraded to testing whether the file exist.
> Instead, I'd go with a shell script like this:
>
> ---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---
> #!/bin/sh
>
> f="$1" \
>   && test -n "$f" \
>   || { echo "Usage: $0 FILE" >&2; exit 1; }
>
> p="."
>
> # Search until the parent is identical to the current directory (='/').
> until [ "$p" -ef "$p/.." ]; do
>   if [ -e "$p/$f" ]; then
>     echo "$p/$f"
>     exit 0
>   fi
>   p="$p/.."
> done
>
> # Now we're in the '/' dir; check once again.
> if [ -e "$p/$f" ]; then
>   echo "$p/$f"
>   exit 0
> fi
>
> echo "'$f' not found" >&2
> exit 1
> --->8--->8--->8--->8--->8--->8--->8--->8--->8--->8--->8---
>
> Have a nice day,
> Berny
>


-- 
Regards,
Peng