I have a table called "files" wherein each object has a name, a parent, and some other fields. What I want to do is, given a filename, find the path to root (root occurs when parent is '').

I have a query that works perfectly when run in the Mongo terminal:

```
var currentFile = parent;
var queue = [];

while(currentFile !== '') {
    var file = db.files.find( { name: currentFile } );
    currentFile = file[0].parent;
    queue.push(currentFile);
}

```

Unfortunately, however, Mongoose does not allow (as far as I have seen from the documentation) arbitrary string queries. I could do it if Mongoose allowed for synchronous queries, but I cannot seem to find that ability either.

**SOLVED**

After re-reading the first comment, I found that to achieve what I needed, I needed to add a callback to the parameters that gets called when currentFile is empty

```
if(currentFile === '') {
    callback();
else
    recursiveFunc(currentFile, callback);

```

I also added the field of 'path' in case I decide to be a little bit more efficient :)

Thank you guys for all the help!