Have Find print just the filenames, not full paths

Question

I'm using the find command in a ksh script, and I'm trying to retrieve just the filenames, rather than the full path. As in, I want it to return text.exe, not //severname/dir1/dir2/text.exe.

How would I go about getting that? To clarify, i know the directory the files are in, i am just grabbing the ones created befoee a ceetain date, so the pathname doesnt matter.

Answer 1

you can do it with:

find ..... |sed 's#.*/##'

however does it really make sense? if there are two files with same filename but located in different directories, how can you distinguish them?

e.g.

you are in /foo

/foo/a.txt
/foo/bar/a.txt

EDIT

edit the answer to gain some better text formatting.

As you described in comment, so you want to

1. find some files,
2. copy them to a dir,
3. gzip them to an archive say a.gz
4. remove copied files only if step 2 was successful

This could be done in one shot:

find ...|xargs tar -czf /path/to/your/target/a.gz 

this will find files, make a tar (a.gz) to your target dir.

Answer 2

If you're using GNU find, then

find path -printf "%f\n"

will just print the file name and exclude the path.

Answer 3

find ... -exec basename {} \; 

will also do the trick .. but as @Kent asks, why do you want this?

Answer 4

Here's another answer.

find | awk -F/ '{print $NF}'    

Answer 5

GNU find natively supports this using -printf so all that you need to do is

find ... -printf '%f\n'