How can I force grep to only return files and ignore directories?

Question

I'm trying to use grep to automatically locate the bibtex program in the user's bin folder.

The problem is, it frequently returns a directory with the name bibtex, which means that the script fails to automatically run the command.

How can I force grep (or indeed the locate command) to automatically ignore directories?

EDIT: The current command is: locate bibtex | grep "/bibtex$" -d skip | head -n1

Gilmagilman

Answer 1

The find command?

find /bin -name bibtex -type f

Looks for a file name "bibtex" of type "f", which is a regular file.

Hooch

icecreamhead, accept this answer immediately, as your search is over :-) – Hebephrenia

This answer does indeed work, but it takes much, much longer than locate, which isn't ideal in this situation – Gilmagilman

Answer 2

locate --basename '\bibtex' --limit 1

Eliminates the need for grep and head, but still doesn't solve the issue of whether the result is a directory.

Why don't you do:

type -P bibtex

which will look in the PATH for a program by that name?

Gaffney

Answer 3

I don't understand exactly so maybe my solution is wrong: why don't you use which? Or bibtex isn't in PATH?

Cypsela

Answer 4

Sigh, not my cleanest, but it works. perl -ne 'chomp($f=$_);print if !-d $f'

which makes your command locate bibtex | perl -ne 'chomp($f=$_);print if !-d $f' | grep "/bibtex$" -d skip | head -n1

Detached

-d skip performs no action here since the input to grep is stdin. You can shorten your command to perl -ne 'chomp; print if ! -d' – Gaffney

That was my first run of it, but I was unsure if the missing line-feeds would cause problems later down the pipe chain. I guess I'm a Nervous Nelly that way. – Detached

By the way, you can shorten that to perl -lne 'print if !-d' (the chomp doesn't seem to be necessary, if it were then perl -lne 'chomp; print if !-d'). – Gaffney