I'm using find for a task and I noticed that when I do something like this: find `pwd` -name "file.ext" -exec echo $(dirname {}) \; it will give you dots only for each match. When you s/dirname/basename in that command you get the full pathnames. Am I screwing something up here or is this expected behavior? I'm used to basename giving you the name of the file (in this case "file.ext") and dirname giving you the rest of the path.