How can I use locate only for a directory

Question

This finds a large number of files that are under various subdirectories of "Dropnot"

$ locate Dropnot

Can I find just the directory location with locate? (which directory "Dropnot" is in)

So if Dropnot is in /home/me/, that's the only entry that gets returned.

If so, what's the simplest / shortest way ?

Preferably through a flag or symbol rather than piping out and greping for it, etc, but I'd take anything as an option.

Maybe some sort of Dropnot$ for end of line? (but didn't work).

Answer 1

There is no option to use locate to find selected type of file (like directory), but you can use syntax from your question - Dropnot$ to find lines that ends with Dropnot. For that you must use -e option to locate to turn on POSIX regular expression.

In this case you should use:

locate -e Dropnot$

---

It is important what version of locate you have. In my system (Gentoo Linux) I have Secure Locate:

$ locate --version
Secure Locate 3.1 - Released March 7, 2006

in which there is no --basename option from uther's answer. This option is provided by GNU Locate from findutils package:

$ ./locate --version
locate (GNU findutils) 4.4.2

If you want to use regexp with GNU Locate you should use -r switch instead -e.

Answer 2

I have mlocate installed. It is the default distributed by RedHat, so it will be on Fedora, RHEL, CentOS. From man 1 locate

-b, --basename
       Match  only  the  base  name  against the specified patterns. This 
       is the opposite of --wholename.

So if you run locate -b '\Dropknot', it will only report files or directories with exactly that string.

Because \ is a globbing character, this disables the implicit replacement 
of NAME by *NAME*.

Answer 3

With GNU locate (other locate implementations might differ):

locate '*/Dropnot'
locate Dropnot | grep '/Dropnot$'

When there is no wildcard in the argument, locate looks for a path having the specified search term as a substring. When the argument is a shell pattern containing one or more wildcard characters, locate looks for a complete match. If you don't want to output the /Dropnot at the end:

locate -0 '*/Dropnot' | xargs -0 -n1 dirname
locate Dropnot | sed -n 's:/Dropnot$::p'