use Perl

• -printf (Score:1)

  by Smylers (2592)

  Gnu Find has a -printf action which you can use to emit just the names of the directories, like this:

  find -name '*.xml' -printf '%h\n' | uniq

  I don't think it's possible to avoid the uniq though; -prune sounds promising, but isn't quite right to be useful here. So for a directory with lots of XML files in it, once it's found the first one and told you the directory you have to sit there and wait while it tells you again for all the others.
  • Or the Unix equivalent: (Score:2)

    by Simon (89)

    find . -name '*.xml' -exec dirname \{\} \; | uniq
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Aristotle (5147)

      Ovid is running this on a pretty big tree, so -exec isn’t a very good idea. Is this a Unix without xargs?
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by youam (9007)

        dirname can't handle more than a single path name, so you'd need to run xargs with -n1, which would be even one more process than find -exec
        • Re:Or the Unix equivalent: (Score:1)

          by Aristotle (5147) <pagaltzis@gmx.de> on 2009.01.04 0:46 (#66718) Homepage Journal

          Hm, good point. I guess sed would have to do in that case:

          find . -name '*.xml' | sed 's/[^/]*\.xml$//; t; d' | uniq

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          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Aristotle (5147)

            Err, and the “t; d;” part in the sed script isn’t even necessary.