i'm trying to write out a list of the names of everything under the /etc directory that are executable to all other users and whose name starts or ends with a number.
find /etc "(" -name "[0-9]*" -o -name "*[0-9]" ")" -perm -o=x -print
But every time I get a wrong answer, can you help?
If you're using the zsh shell, you can get that list of files with its advanced filename generation globbing; no external programs needed. In particular, using a recursive glob, alternation, and a glob qualifier that matches world-executable files:
zsh$ printf "%s\n" /etc/**/([0-9]*|*[0-9])(X)
/etc/alternatives/animate-im6
/etc/alternatives/c89
/etc/alternatives/c99
/etc/alternatives/compare-im6
/etc/alternatives/composite-im6
...
/etc/X11
/etc/X11/fonts/Type1
/etc/xdg/xdg-xubuntu/xfce4
/etc/xdg/xfce4
/etc/xfce4
Do a setopt glob_dots first to match filenames starting with . like find does. Otherwise they get skipped.
If you're using find, you need the -mode argument to -perm to select files with at least the given permission bits (Which is actually what you have in your question and works for me)
find /etc \( -name "[0-9]*" -o -name "*[0-9]" \) -perm -o=x
Related
I have the following Makefile which should find all .tex files starting with prefix "slides" and then compile all these latex files:
TSLIDES = $(shell find . -maxdepth 1 -iname 'slides*.tex' -printf '%f\n')
TPDFS = $(TSLIDES:%.tex=%.pdf)
all: $(TPDFS)
$(TPDFS): %.pdf: %.tex
latexmk -pdf $<
However, I keep getting the error messages (I am pretty sure it used to work and am very confused why I am getting this error now...)
/usr/bin/find: paths must precede expression: `slides01-intro.tex'
/usr/bin/find: possible unquoted pattern after predicate `-iname'?
In the manual, I found this
NON-BUGS
Operator precedence surprises
The command find . -name afile -o -name bfile -print will never print
afile because this is actually equivalent to find . -name afile -o \(
-name bfile -a -print \). Remember that the precedence of -a is
higher than that of -o and when there is no operator specified
between tests, -a is assumed.
“paths must precede expression” error message
$ find . -name *.c -print
find: paths must precede expression
Usage: find [-H] [-L] [-P] [-Olevel] [-D ... [path...] [expression]
This happens because *.c has been expanded by the shell resulting in
find actually receiving a command line like this:
find . -name frcode.c locate.c word_io.c -print
That command is of course not going to work. Instead of doing things
this way, you should enclose the pattern in quotes or escape the
wildcard:
$ find . -name '*.c' -print
$ find . -name \*.c -print
But this does not help in my case as I have used quotes to avoid shell expansion. Any idea how I can fix this (I have also tried TSLIDES = $(shell find . -maxdepth 1 -iname 'slides*.tex' in the first line of my Makefile but it exits with the same error?
EDIT: I am on windows and use the git bash (which is based on mingw-64).
You should always make very clear up-front in questions using Windows, that you're using Windows. Running POSIX-based tools like make on Windows always requires a bit of extra work. But I'm assuming based on the mingw-w64 label that you are, in fact, on Windows.
I tried your example on my GNU/Linux system and it worked perfectly. My suspicion is that your version of GNU make is invoking Windows cmd.exe instead of a POSIX shell like bash. In Windows cmd.exe, the single-quote character ' is not treated like a quote character.
Try replacing your single quotes with double-quotes " and see if it works:
TSLIDES = $(shell find . -maxdepth 1 -iname "slides*.tex" -printf "%f\n")
I'm also not sure if the \n will be handled properly. But you don't really need it, you can just use -print (or even, in GNU find, leave it out completely as it's the default action).
I'm not a Windows person so the above might not help but it's my best guess. If not please edit your question and provide more details about the environment you're using: where you got your version of make, where you're running it from, etc.
I have arraylist of files and I am trying to use rm with xargs to remove files like:
dups=["test.csv","man.csv","teams.csv"]
How can I pass the complete dups array to find and delete these files?
I want to make changes below to make it work
find ${dups[#]} -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm
Your find command is wrong.
# XXX buggy: read below
find foo bar baz -type f -print0
means look in the paths foo, bar, and baz, and print any actual files within those. (If one of the paths is a directory, it will find all files within that directory. If one of the paths is a file in the current directory, it will certainly find it, but then what do you need find for?)
If these are files in the current directory, simply
rm -- "${dups[#]}"
(notice also how to properly quote the array expansion).
If you want to look in all subdirectories for files with these names, you will need something like
find . -type f \( -name "test.csv" -o -name "man.csv" -o -name "teams.csv" \) -delete
or perhaps
find . -type f -regextype egrep -regex '.*/(test\.csv|man\.csv|teams\.csv)' -delete
though the -regex features are somewhat platform-dependent (try find -E instead of find -regextype egrep on *BSD/MacOS to enable ERE regex support).
Notice also how find has a built-in predicate -delete so you don't need the external utility rm at all. (Though if you wanted to run a different utility, find -exec utility {} + is still more efficient than xargs. Some really old find implementations didn't have the + syntax for -exec but you seem to be on Linux where it is widely supported.)
Building this command line from an array is not entirely trivial; I have proposed a duplicate which has a solution to a similar problem. But of course, if you are building the command from Java, it should be easy to figure out how to do this on the Java side instead of passing in an array to Bash; and then, you don't need Bash at all (you can pass this to find directly, or at least use sh instead of bash because the command doesn't require any Bash features).
I'm not a Java person, but from Python this would look like
import subprocess
command = ["find", ".", "-type", "f"]
prefix = "("
for filename in dups:
command.extend([prefix, "-name", filename])
prefix = "-o"
command.extend([")", "-delete"])
subprocess.run(command, check=True, encoding="utf-8")
Notice how the backslashes and quotes are not necessary when there is no shell involved.
I'm working in win 10 with git-bash. I have a large group of files all of which have no extension. However I've realized that those of type "File" are html files. To select these I have been shown:
$ find -not -name '*.*'
Now I need to rename all these files to add a .html extension (they currently have no extension). I've tried :
$ find -not -name '*.*' -execdir mv {} {}.html
find: missing argument to `-execdir'
How can I rename these files?
You're missing a ; -- a literal semicolon passed to signal the end of the arguments parsed as part of the -exec action. Accepting such a terminator lets find accept other actions following -exec, whereas otherwise any action in that family would need to be the very last argument on the command line.
find -not -name '*.*' -execdir mv -- '{}' '{}.html' ';'
That said, note that the above isn't guaranteed to work at all (or to work with names that start with dashes). More portable would be:
find . -not -name '*.*' -exec sh -c 'for arg do mv -- "$arg" "$arg.html"; done' _ {} +
Note the changes:
The . specifying the directory to start the search at is mandatory in POSIX-standard find; the ability to leave it out on GNU platforms is a nonportable extension.
Running an explicit shell means you don't need {}.html to be supported, and so can work with any compliant find.
The -- ensures that the following arguments are parsed as literal filenames, not options to mv, even if they start with dashes.
In the above, the explicit _ becomes $0 of the shell, so later arguments become $1 and onward -- ie. the array otherwise known as "$#", which for iterates over by default.
I've got the following line in my bash script:
for i in $(find ./TTDD* -type f)
do
It works when there's files in the directory, but when it's empty I get the following:
find ... No such file or directory
How can I suppress that exact error message, as I'm logging output and doesn't care about that specific error message.
The problem is that globs that don't have any matches expand to themselves, and since there's no file named TTDD*, you get this error.
You can rewrite it in different ways. The most straight forward is:
find . -path './TTDD*' -type f
This will show the same files.
If there are other directories in the current dir, it will waste some time going through their files even if they'll never match. If required, you can short-circuit such directories with a less readable find . -path . -o -not -path './TTDD*' -prune -o -type f -print.
NB: iterating over these files with a for loops will break for files with spaces and various other special characters. You can combine this with anubhava's answer to safely read all filenames while also not suppressing all of find's other potentially useful error messages.
while IFS= read -rd '' f; do
printf "Processing [%s]\n" "$f"
done < <(find . -path './TTDD*' -type f -print0 2>/dev/null)
How about you use "-exec"?
This way you can redirect all results of your find command to the input of some other command, e.g., let's say that I want to find all the files within a given folder that are owned by the root user and I want to change the ownership of these files, here is the code:
find ${DataFS}/Data -user root -exec chown someuser:someuser {} \;
The approach you are using is similar to
find ${DataFS}/Data -user root -print0 | xargs -0 chown someuser:someuser
Which is not ideal because it will fail in case it can't find any files (i.e., if it prints an empty string), i.e., chown: missing operand after `someuser:someuser'
I'm working in Linux & bash (or Cygwin & bash).
I have a huge--huge--directory structure, and I have to find a few needles in the haystack.
Specifically, I'm looking for these files (20 or so):
foo.c
bar.h
...
quux.txt
I know that they are in a subdirectory somewhere under ..
I know I can find any one of them with
find . -name foo.c -print. This command takes a few minutes to execute.
How can I print the names of these files with their full directory name? I don't want to execute 20 separate finds--it will take too long.
Can I give find the list of files from stdin? From a file? Is there a different command that does what I want?
Do I have to first assemble a command line for find with -o using a loop or something?
If your directory structure is huge but not changing frequently, it is good to run
cd /to/root/of/the/files
find . -type f -print > ../LIST_OF_FILES.txt #and sometimes handy the next one too
find . -type d -print > ../LIST_OF_DIRS.txt
after it you can really FAST find anything (with grep, sed, etc..) and update the file-lists only when the tree is changed. (it is a simplified replacement if you don't have locate)
So,
grep '/foo.c$' LIST_OF_FILES.txt #list all foo.c in the tree..
When want find a list of files, you can try the following:
fgrep -f wanted_file_list.txt < LIST_OF_FILES.txt
or directly with the find command
find . type f -print | fgrep -f wanted_file_list.txt
the -f for fgrep mean - read patterns from the file, so you can easily grepping input for multiple patterns...
You shouldn't need to run find twenty times.
You can construct a single command with a multiple of filename specifiers:
find . \( -name 'file1' -o -name 'file2' -o -name 'file3' \) -exec echo {} \;
Is the locate(1) command an acceptable answer? Nightly it builds an index, and you can query the index quite quickly:
$ time locate id_rsa
/home/sarnold/.ssh/id_rsa
/home/sarnold/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
real 0m0.779s
user 0m0.760s
sys 0m0.010s
I gave up executing a similar find command in my home directory at 36 seconds. :)
If nightly doesn't work, you could run the updatedb(8) program by hand once before running locate(1) queries. /etc/updatedb.conf (updatedb.conf(5)) lets you select specific directories or filesystem types to include or exclude.
Yes, assemble your command line.
Here's a way to process a list of files from stdin and assemble your (FreeBSD) find command to use extended regular expression matching (n1|n2|n3).
For GNU find you may have to use one of the following options to enable extended regular expression matching:
-regextype posix-egrep
-regextype posix-extended
echo '
foo\\.c
bar\\.h
quux\\.txt
' | xargs bash -c '
IFS="|";
find -E "$PWD" -type f -regex "^.*/($*)$" -print
echo find -E "$PWD" -type f -regex "^.*/($*)$" -print
' arg0
# note: "$*" uses the first character of the IFS variable as array item delimiter
(
IFS='|'
set -- 1 2 3 4 5
echo "$*" # 1|2|3|4|5
)