I have been trying to come up with a mdfind to locate certain files. I am not using find because it takes too long to search across a windows drive and I am on a Mac. I have indexed using mdutil and now simply want to search for files with the pattern where the file in the path starts with example. "/Volumes/DRIVE/SOME/PATH/DAD14-BLAH-BLAH.jpg". There must be a simpler way to use mdfind to look for a jpg greater than 500k and grep the path with a pattern? Below is the code I have come up with but no results are returned. Any help is deeply appreciated.
cat filelist.txt | while read -r FILE;
do mdfind -onlyin /Volumes/DRIVE/ 'kMDItemKind = "*image" && kMDItemFSSize > 500000' -name "$FILE" -0
| xargs -0 -I{} grep -i -E '.*\/[a-zA-Z]{1,3}[0-9]+.*\.(jpe?g|png|tiff?|psd)' {}
| xargs -0 -I{} cp -a {} ./images; done;
Bass
You don't want to use xargs for the grep command. Doing so means grepping the contents of the found files for matches of the pattern. You want to actually grep the output of mdfind.
That also means you don't want to use -0 with mdfind. You want each file path to be on a separate line, since grep is going to output the matching lines. Therefore, you don't want to use -0 with the final xargs command, either.
You probably want to require that the extension is at the end of the string. And you want the explicit slash (/) in your pattern to be the last slash in the string.
cat filelist.txt | while read -r FILE;
do mdfind -onlyin /Volumes/DRIVE/ 'kMDItemKind = "*image" && kMDItemFSSize > 500000' -name "$FILE"
| grep -i -E '.*\/[a-zA-Z]{1,3}[0-9]+[^/]*\.(jpe?g|png|tiff?|psd)$'
| xargs -I{} cp -a {} ./images; done;
Related
I can't find posts that help with this exact problem:
On Mac Terminal I want to read a txt file (example.txt) containing file names such as:
20130815 144129 865 000000 0172 0780.bmp
20130815 144221 511 000003 1068 0408.bmp
....100 more
And I want to search for them in a certain folder/subfolders (example_folder). After each find, the file should be copied to a new folder x (new_destination).
Your help would be much appreciated!
Chers,
Mo
You could use a piped command with a combination of ls, grep, xargs and cp.
So basically you start with getting the list of files
ls
then you filter them with egrep -e, grep -e or whatever flavor of grep Mac uses for their terminal. If you want to find all files ending with text you can use the regex .txt$ (which means ends with '.txt')
ls | egrep -e "yourRegexExpression"
After that you get an input stream, but cp doesn't work with input streams and only takes a bunch of arguments, that's why we use xargs to convert it to arguments. The final step is to add the flag -t to the argument to signify that the next argument is the target directory.
ls | egrep -e "yourRegexExpression" | xargs cp -t DIRECTORY
I hope this helps!
Edit
Sorry I didn't read the question well enough, I updated to be match your problem. Here you can see that the egrep command compiles a rather large regex string with all the file names in this way (filename1|filename2|...|fileN). The $() evaluates the command inside and uses the tr to translate newLines to "|" for the regex.
ls | egrep -e "("$(cat yourtextfile.txt | tr "\n" "|")")" | xargs cp -t DIRECTORY
You could do something like:
$ for i in `cat example.txt`
find /search/path -type f -name "$i" -exec cp "{}" /new/path \;
This is how it works, for every line within example.txt:
for i in `cat example.txt`
it will try to find a file matching the line $i in the defined path:
find /search/path -type f -name "$i"
And if found it will copy it to the desired location:
-exec cp "{}" /new/path \;
I have managed to do this separately using
grep -r "zone 19" path
mkdir zone19
find . -name "ListOfFilesfromGrep" -exec mv -i {} zone19 \;
I just don't know how to combine the two, that is, how to input the list of files I get from grep into the find command.
You should use grep from within find:
find /path/to/dir -type f -exec grep -q "zone 19" {} \; -exec mv -i {} zone19 \;
You could try
grep -lr "zone 19" path | while read in ; do mv -i "$in" zone19; done
-l prints the filenames with matched string; while ... done move the files one by one.
Using GNU versions of the standard tools:
grep -l will give you the filenames.
mv -t will move to a given directory.
xargs -r will invoke a command using arguments from stdin, but only if there's at least one.
Combine them like this:
grep -l -r -e 'zone 19' path | xargs -r mv -i -t 'zone19'
Or (if your filenames might contain newlines etc):
grep -lZr -e 'zone 19' path | xargs -0r mv -it 'zone19'
You can pipe the result from grep and use xargs:
grep -lr "zone 19" path | xargs <command>
<command> will be applied on each result of grep. Note thta -o flag tells grep to show only matching parts.
Below is the command to move all files containing string "Hello" to folder zone19.
grep Hello * |cut -f1 -d":"|sort -u|xargs -I {} mv {} zone19
grep -n magenta *| rm *
grep: a.txt: No such file or directory
grep: b: No such file or directory
Above command removes all files present in the directory except ., .. .
It should remove only those files which contains the word "magenta"
Also, tried grep magenta * -exec rm '{}' \; but no luck.
Any idea?
Use xargs:
grep -l --null magenta ./* | xargs -0 rm
The purpose of xargs is to take input on stdin and place it on the command line of its argument.
What the options do:
The -l option tells grep not to print the matching text and instead just print the names of the files that contain matching text.
The --null option tells grep to separate the filenames with NUL characters. This allows all manner of filenames to be handled safely.
The -0 option to xargs to treat its input as NUL-separated.
Here is a safe way:
grep -lr magenta . | xargs -0 rm -f --
-l prints file names of files matching the search pattern.
-r performs a recursive search for the pattern magenta in the given directory ..
If this doesn't work, try -R.
(i.e., as multiple names instead of one).
xargs -0 feeds the file names from grep to rm -f
-- is often forgotten but it is very important to mark the end of options and allow for removal of files whose names begin with -.
If you would like to see which files are about to be deleted, simply remove the | xargs -0 rm -f -- part.
I would like to search a directory for any file that matches any of a list of words. If a file matches, I would like to copy that file into a new directory. I created a small batch of test files and got the following code working:
cp `grep -lir 'word\|word2\|word3\|word4\|word5' '/Users/originallocation'` '/Users/newlocation'
Unfortunately, when I run this code on a large folder with a few thousand files it says the argument list is too long for cp. I think I need to loop this or use a xargs but I can't figure out how to make the conversion.
The minimal change from what you have would be:
grep -lir 'word\|word2\|word3\|word4\|word5' '/Users/originallocation' | \
xargs cp -t '/Users/newlocation'
But, don't use that. Because you never know when you will encounter a filename with spaces or newlines in it, null-terminated strings should be used. On linux/GNU, add the -Z option to grep and -0 to xargs:
grep -Zlir 'word\|word2\|word3\|word4\|word5' '/Users/originallocation' | \
xargs -0 cp -t '/Users/newlocation'
On Macs (and AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, *BSD), the grep options change slightly but, more importantly, the GNU cp -t option is not available. A workaround is:
grep -lir --null 'word\|word2\|word3\|word4\|word5' '/Users/originallocation' | \
xargs -0 -I fname cp fname '/Users/newlocation'
This is less efficient because a new instance of cp has to be run for each file to be copied.
Alternative solution for those without grep -r. Using find + egrep + xargs , hope there is no file with same file name in different folders. Secondly, I replaced the ugly style of word\|word2\|word3\|word4\|word5
find . -type f -exec egrep -l 'word|word2|word3|word4|word5' {} \; |xargs -i cp {} /LARGE_FOLDER
So after a lot of searching and trying to interpret others' questions and answers to my needs, I decided to ask for myself.
I'm trying to take a directory structure full of images and place all the images (regardless of extension) in a single folder. In addition to this, I want to be able to remove images matching certain filenames in the process. I have a find command working that outputs all the filepaths for me
find -type f -exec file -i -- {} + | grep -i image | sed 's/\:.*//'
but if I try to use that to copy files, I have trouble with the spaces in the filenames.
cp `find -type f -exec file -i -- {} + | grep -i image | sed 's/\:.*//'` out/
What am I doing wrong, and is there a better way to do this?
With the caveat that it won't work if files have newlines in their names:
find . -type f -exec file -i -- {} + |
awk -vFS=: -vOFS=: '$NF ~ /image/{NF--;printf "%s\0", $0}' |
xargs -0 cp -t out/
(Based on answer by Jonathan Leffler and subsequent comments discussion with him and #devnull.)
The find command works well if none of the file names contain any newlines. Within broad limits, the grep command works OK under the same circumstances. The sed command works fine as long as there are no colons in the file names. However, given that there are spaces in the names, the use of $(...) (command substitution, also indicated by back-ticks `...`) is a disaster. Unfortunately, xargs isn't readily a part of the solution; it splits on spaces by default. Because you have to run file and grep in the middle, you can't easily use the -print0 option to (GNU) find and the -0 option to (GNU) xargs.
In some respects, it is crude, but in many ways, it is easiest if you write an executable shell script that can be invoked by find:
#!/bin/bash
for file in "$#"
do
if file -i -- "$file" | grep -i -q "$file:.*image"
then cp "$file" out/
fi
done
This is a little painful in that it invokes file and grep separately for each name, but it is reliable. The file command is even safe if the file name contains a newline; the grep is probably not.
If that script is called 'copyimage.sh', then the find command becomes:
find . -type f -exec ./copyimage.sh {} +
And, given the way the grep command is written, the copyimage.sh file won't be copied, even though its name contains the magic word 'image'.
Pipe the results of your find command to
xargs -l --replace cp "{}" out/
Example of how this works for me on Ubuntu 10.04:
atomic#atomic-desktop:~/temp$ ls
img.png img space.png
atomic#atomic-desktop:~/temp$ mkdir out
atomic#atomic-desktop:~/temp$ find -type f -exec file -i \{\} \; | grep -i image | sed 's/\:.*//' | xargs -l --replace cp -v "{}" out/
`./img.png' -> `out/img.png'
`./img space.png' -> `out/img space.png'
atomic#atomic-desktop:~/temp$ ls out
img.png img space.png
atomic#atomic-desktop:~/temp$