How to get only the file name using find command on Linux?

Linux find statement is one of the most widely used statements that allows us to walk a file hierarchy. It is used to mostly find a specific file or directories and we can also append different other Linux statements or flags along with it to enhance or do a complex operation.

Let’s explore an example of a find statement to understand it better.

In the linux code shown below I am trying to search for a file inside my Downloads folder, and for that I am making use of the find statement.

find sample.sh

Output

sample.sh

Notice that if the find command is able to locate the file then it will simply print the name of the file, if not then it will not return anything the terminal process will terminate.

Now we know how find statement works, let’s explore the case where we only want to get the names of the files and not everything that comes with it.

If you are making use of GNU terminal, then the command shown below will help you to achieve just that.

Just write the command to your GNU terminal

find ./ -type f -printf "%f
"

Output

immukul@192 ~ % find ./ -type f -printf "%f
"
Applications
C: emp1
Desktop
Documents
Downloads
Exercism
IdeaProjects
Library
MEGAsync
MEGAsync Downloads
Movies
Music
Pictures
Public
PycharmProjects

It should be noted that if you are not on a GNU terminal, then you might get an error stating that -printf is not found. In that case, you can make use of a bash script that helps us to achieve the same output.

Consider the script code shown below −

for file in **; do echo ${file##*/}; done

Just save the above code in a file ending with a .sh extension and then give the file permission using the following command −

chmod 777 out.sh

Finally execute the shell script, using the following command −

./out.sh

Output

immukul@192 ~ % ./out.sh
Applications
C: emp1
Desktop
Documents
Downloads
Exercism
IdeaProjects
Library
MEGAsync
MEGAsync Downloads
Movies
Music
Pictures
Public
PycharmProjects