Have you written a clever script that relies on the find command output, and you wish you could get rid of the parent path for one reason or another?

If you remove it manually with another GNU util or even manually, I don’t blame you since I have done the same thing more than once. However, the funny thing is that find already offers this out of the box, which is documented already, it just happens not to be that obvious.

So let’s say you are looking for all the GNU Linux binaries names which do not have any extension and you don’t want their path.

$ find dist/bundle -type f -not -name '*.exe' -not -name '*.ps*' -printf '%P\n'
binary-one
binary-two
binary-three

And in case you were wondering this is how the output would look like without the -printf '%P\n' operator

$ find dist/bundle -type f -not -name '*.exe' -not -name '*.ps*'
dist/bundle/binary-one
dist/bundle/binary-two
dist/bundle/binary-three

Last modified on 2022-05-18