How can I store the file that find produces i.e the actual file and contents as a file and not the console output of find?

Currently I’m doing this to try and store the actual file and its contents the find command finds as I’m searching for a file named Myfile:

find /Users/Documents -name Myfile > outputfile

The contents of Myfile is:

This is my original file.

however when I go to perform an operation, such as cat outputfile it takes the actual output of the find command,rather than the file itself and displays:

/Users/Documents/Myfile

I am expecting when I do cat outputfile:

This is my original file.

How can I store the file itself and perform operations on it? My particular use case is to perform static analysis of the file and I need to pass it as an argument. I have recently found using find. I don’t care for displaying the output of the command. I want to find a file based on the name of the file, then perform a scan and work with the contents of that original file, by storing it as a variable. The reason I want to store it as a variable is so that I can pass it as an argument to another program.

Answer

To store the path to the file in a variable, use:

fil=$(find /Users/Documents -name Myfile)

To actually redirect the output of the found file(s) use the exec flag in find and so:

find /Users/Documents -name Myfile -exec cat '{}' ; > outputfile

If you want to store the output in a variable as opposed to redirect to a file you can use:

conts=$(find /Users/Documents -name Myfile -exec cat '{}' ;)