Find files and print only their parent directories

Am I missing something here. Surely all this regex and/or looping is not necessary, a one-liner will do the job. Also "for foo in $()" solutions will fail when there are spaces in the path names.

Just use dirname twice with xargs, to get parent's parent...

# make test case
mkdir -p /nfs/office/hht/info
mkdir -p /nfs/office/wee1/info
touch /nfs/office/hht/info/.user.log
touch /nfs/office/wee1/info/.user.log

# parent's parent approach
cd /nfs//office/ && find . -name '.user.log' | xargs -I{} dirname {} | xargs -I{} dirname {}

# alternative, have find print parent directory, so dirname only needed once...
cd /nfs//office/ && find . -name ".user.log" -printf "%h\n"  | xargs -I{} dirname {}

Produces

./hht
./wee1

You can do this easily with the formatting options of the -printf action of find (see man find).

cd /nfs//office/ && find . -name '.user.log' -printf "%h\n"
./hht/info
./wee1/info

From the man page:

%h\n will print path for each file on a new line.

Please note that -printf is GNU-only. It won't work on macOS (a BSD system).

for file in $(find /nfs/office -name .user.log -print)
do
    parent=$(dirname $(dirname $file))
    echo $parent
done

EDIT: Sorry missed that you want the grandparent directory.