find

Your current command is almost there, instead off using xargs with grep, lets:

1. Move the grep to an -exec
2. Use xargs to pass the result to dirname to show only the parent folder

find ./ -maxdepth 2 -type f -exec grep -l "foo-bundle" {} /dev/null \; | xargs dirname 

If you only want to search for composer.json files, we can include the -iname option like so:

find ./ -maxdepth 2 -type f -iname '*composer.json' -exec grep -l "foo-bundle" {} /dev/null \; | xargs dirname 

If the | xargs dirname doesn't give enough data, we can extend it so we can loop over the results of find using a while read like so:

find ./ -maxdepth 2 -type f -iname '*composer.json' -exec grep -l "foo-bundle" {} /dev/null \; | while read -r line ; do parent="$(dirname ${line%%:*})" echo "$parent" done 

grep

We can use grep to search for all files containing a specific text.

After looping over each line, we can

1. Remove behind the : to get the filepath
2. Use dirname to get the parent folder path

Consider this file setup, were /test/b/composer.json contains foo-bundle

➜ /tmp tree . ├── test │   ├── a │   │   └── composer.json │   └── b │   └── composer.json └── test.sh 

When running the following test.sh:

#!/bin/bash grep -rw '/tmp/test' --include '*composer.json' -e 'foo-bundle' | while read -r line ; do parent="$(dirname ${line%:*})" echo "$parent" done 

The result is as expected, the path to folder b:

/tmp/test/b 

In order to find all files, containing a particular piece of text, you can use:

find ./ -maxdepth 2 -type f -exec grep -l "composer.json" {} /dev/null \; 

The result is a list of filenames. Now all you need to do is to get a way to launch the command dirname on all of them. (I tried using a simple pipe, but that would have been too easy :-) )

Thanks to @0stone0 for leading the way. I finally got it with:

#!/bin/sh find /var/www -maxdepth 2 -type f -print | grep -i 'composer.json' | xargs grep -i 'foo-bundle' | while read -r line ; do parent="$(dirname ${line%%:*})" echo "$parent" done