How to find basename of path via pipe

Question

This doesn't work:

find "$all_locks" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | basename

apparently basename cannot read from stdin - in any case basename requires at least one argument.

Discourtesy

Are you simply looking to strip off the final directory name, or are you looking to find the parents of things that might be symbolic links from $all_locks? – Hartle

I am just trying to get the basename of each path resulting from find – Discourtesy

So if /path/to/this is a symlink to /some/other/place, should your result be /path/to or /some/other? – Hartle

Answer 1

To apply a command to every result of a piped operation, xargs is your friend. As it says on the man page I linked...

xargs reads items from the standard input, delimited by blanks (which can be protected with double or single quotes or a backslash) or newlines, and executes the command (default is /bin/echo) one or more times with any initial-arguments followed by items read from standard input.

In this case that means it will take each result from your find command and run basename <find result>ad nauseum, until find has completed its search. I believe what you want is going to look a lot like this:

find "$all_locks" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | xargs basename

Lashley

Answer 2

The problem here is basename doesn't accept the stdin and hence unnamed pipes may not be useful. I would like to modify your command a little bit. Let me know if it serves the purpose.

find -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec basename {}  \;

Note: Not enough reputation to comment, hence posting it here.

Featheredge

on ubuntu bash 4, I get find: missing argument to '-exec'...weird – Discourtesy

@MrCholo, I hope you didn't miss a space between {} and \ ? Because, I can recreate your problem by erasing that space. – Featheredge

Answer 3

With GNU find:

find "$all_locks" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -printf '%f\n'

Garver