find path directory in sub directory

Question

I want to find the path for directory name bbb where the parent directory called aaa

For example

/aaa/bbb
/tmp/aaa/bbb
/usr/bin/aaa/bbb
/home/aaa/bbb
/home/aaa/xxx/bbb

So i wrote something like this:

find /*/aaa -name bbb

In some platforms it works and in some it doesn't, and in any case the /aaa/bbb is not found because there is no parent directory to aaa

I guess I could run find / -name bbb | grep \/aaa but I think if there is something smarter..?

Answer 1

Use the -path option for this case:

find / -type d  -path '*/aaa/bbb'

From the man page for find:

File name matches shell pattern pattern. The metacharacters do not treat / or . specially; so, for example,

find . -path "./sr*sc"

will print an entry for a directory called `./src/misc' (if one exists).

Cross-Platform Compatibility

Edit: I just noticed the aix and hp-ux tags.

You don’t specify which version of find you’re using and the above information applies to GNU find. However, the man page also specifies that,

The predicate -path is also supported by HP-UX find and will be in a forthcoming version of the POSIX standard.

so it looks like -path can be used in HP-UX but not with AIX (at least not AIX 7.1, the latest release as of 2015-08-24).

Answer 2

/*/aaa does not match /aaa and this is the reason why find cannot find /aaa/bbb

If you don't like to start the find at / and if you don't have a recent find like the portable sfind that supports -path you need a better manual start list.