I've done this atm, I need to find in the main directory and in the sub-directory everything starting with the letter 'a', every files ending with 'z' and every files starting with 'z' and ending with 'a!'.
find . -name "a*" | find . "*z" -type f | find . "z*a!" -type f
I tried to be as clear as possible, sorry if it wasn't clear enough.
find . -type f \( -name 'a*' -or -name '*z' -or -name 'z*a!' \)
Use -o instead of -or for POSIX compliance.
If you really want to also find links, directories, pipes etc. starting with a but only files matching the remaining conditions, you can do
find . -name 'a*' -or -type f \(-name '*z' -or -name 'z*a!' \)
TL;DR
find . -name 'a*' -o -type f \( -name '*z' -o -name 'z*a!' \)
Explanations:
The find logical operators are -a (AND) and -o (OR). You use them to combine elementary tests. Note that because of operator's precedence you sometimes need parentheses and that they must be escaped (with \) to prevent their interpretation by the shell. Your test is:
everything starting with the letter 'a': -name 'a*'.
every files ending with 'z': -type f -a -name '*z'.
every files starting with 'z' and ending with 'a!': -type f -a -name 'z*a!'.
So the complete test could be:
-name 'a*' -o \( -type f -a -name '*z' \) -o \( -type f -a -name 'z*a!' \)
As -a is the default we can omit it, and as -type f (file) is common to the two last terms of the disjunction we can factor it:
-name 'a*' -o -type f \( -name '*z' -o -name 'z*a!' \)
I was trying to get a list of all python and html files in a directory with the command find Documents -name "*.{py,html}".
Then along came the man page:
Braces within the pattern (‘{}’) are not considered to be special (that is, find . -name 'foo{1,2}' matches a file named foo{1,2}, not the files foo1 and foo2.
As this is part of a pipe-chain, I'd like to be able to specify which extensions it matches at runtime (no hardcoding). If find just can't do it, a perl one-liner (or similar) would be fine.
Edit: The answer I eventually came up with include all sorts of crap, and is a bit long as well, so I posted it as an answer to the original itch I was trying to scratch. Feel free to hack that up if you have better solutions.
Use -o, which means "or":
find Documents \( -name "*.py" -o -name "*.html" \)
You'd need to build that command line programmatically, which isn't that easy.
Are you using bash (or Cygwin on Windows)? If you are, you should be able to do this:
ls **/*.py **/*.html
which might be easier to build programmatically.
Some editions of find, mostly on linux systems, possibly on others aswell support -regex and -regextype options, which finds files with names matching the regex.
for example
find . -regextype posix-egrep -regex ".*\.(py|html)$"
should do the trick in the above example.
However this is not a standard POSIX find function and is implementation dependent.
You could programmatically add more -name clauses, separated by -or:
find Documents \( -name "*.py" -or -name "*.html" \)
Or, go for a simple loop instead:
for F in Documents/*.{py,html}; do ...something with each '$F'... ; done
This will find all .c or .cpp files on linux
$ find . -name "*.c" -o -name "*.cpp"
You don't need the escaped parenthesis unless you are doing some additional mods. Here from the man page they are saying if the pattern matches, print it. Perhaps they are trying to control printing. In this case the -print acts as a conditional and becomes an "AND'd" conditional. It will prevent any .c files from being printed.
$ find . -name "*.c" -o -name "*.cpp" -print
But if you do like the original answer you can control the printing. This will find all .c files as well.
$ find . \( -name "*.c" -o -name "*.cpp" \) -print
One last example for all c/c++ source files
$ find . \( -name "*.c" -o -name "*.cpp" -o -name "*.h" -o -name "*.hpp" \) -print
I had a similar need. This worked for me:
find ../../ \( -iname 'tmp' -o -iname 'vendor' \) -prune -o \( -iname '*.*rb' -o -iname '*.rjs' \) -print
My default has been:
find -type f | egrep -i "*.java|*.css|*.cs|*.sql"
Like the less process intencive find execution by Brendan Long and Stephan202 et al.:
find Documents \( -name "*.py" -or -name "*.html" \)
Braces within the pattern \(\) is required for name pattern with or
find Documents -type f \( -name "*.py" -or -name "*.html" \)
While for the name pattern with and operator it is not required
find Documents -type f ! -name "*.py" -and ! -name "*.html"
#! /bin/bash
filetypes="*.py *.xml"
for type in $filetypes
do
find Documents -name "$type"
done
simple but works :)
I needed to remove all files in child dirs except for some files. The following worked for me (three patterns specified):
find . -depth -type f -not -name *.itp -and -not -name *ane.gro -and -not -name *.top -exec rm '{}' +
This works on AIX korn shell.
find *.cbl *.dms -prune -type f -mtime -1
This is looking for *.cbl or *.dms which are 1 day old, in current directory only, skipping the sub-directories.
find MyDir -iname "*.[j][p][g]"
+
find MyDir -iname "*.[b][m][p]"
=
find MyDir -iname "*.[jb][pm][gp]"
What about
ls {*.py,*.html}
It lists out all the files ending with .py or .html in their filenames
I currently have a directory structure that I need to be able to roll through each of 100 or so directories and run a script on them individually while excluding this check on a handful of other directories.
This is what I have been using in the past:
find ./OTHER/ -maxdepth 2 -wholename '*_*/*.txt' -execdir /files/bin/other_process {} +
I would like to exclude certain directories from this check and have not found a sufficient answer to this problem.
This has been my best attempt (or two) at the problem:
find ./OTHER/ \( -path ./OTHER/X???_EXCLUDE_THIS -prune -o -path ./OTHER/X???_IGNORE_THIS -prune -o \) -type d \(-name *_*/*.txt \) -execdir /files/bin/other_process {} +
I get:
find: paths must precede expression ./OTHER/A101_EXCLUDE_THIS/
This is the return that I get on nearly every variation that I have used.
This has been my best attempt (or two) at the problem:
find ./OTHER/ \( -path ./OTHER/X???_EXCLUDE_THIS -prune -o -path ./OTHER/X???_IGNORE_THIS -prune -o \) -type d \(-name *_*/*.txt \) -execdir /files/bin/other_process {} +
Errors in this attempt:
\(-name: There must be a space after \(.
-name *_*/*.txt: -name is for base of file name; use -path here.
*_*/*.txt: You should quote such patterns to prevent expansion by the shell.
-o \): -o does not belong at the end of an expression; you mean \) -o. But you don't need parentheses here.
-type d: Since you want to find regular files *.txt, you must not look for a directory.
With those errors corrected, it works:
find ./OTHER/ -path './OTHER/X???_EXCLUDE_THIS' -prune -o -path './OTHER/X???_IGNORE_THIS' -prune -o -path '*_*/*.txt' -execdir echo {} +
I tried to use this command in my work dir
find . -type d \( ! -name .git -prune \) -o \( ! -name .hg -prune \)
Does not seem to work?
removing prune will only exclude .git or .hg directories, not their subdir
find . \( -name .git -o -name .hg \) -prune -o -type d -print
My answer is essentially the same as #Barmar's, which I have upvoted:
find . \( -name .git -o -name .hg \) -prune -o \( -type d -print \)
A little explanation about this command might be helpful to you:
Here -o means OR. When find finds a file's name matching .git or .hg, it stops the further search due to -prune option and evaluates to true, hence skips the other -o branch(which is directory printing). That's why only those directories not containing .git or .hg will show up.
You may also refer to this question on SO: How to use '-prune' option of 'find' in sh?
I'm searching some files with: find . -name "*.en.php" and find . -name "*.fr.php".
I want both commands in the same line, something like : find . -name "*.(en|fr).php" but it doesn't work.
Thanks in advance for your help.
EDIT
my command is like this : find . -not -path Config -name "*.fr.php", is there a solution do not repeat -not -path Config ?
Try:
find -name "*.en.php" -o -name "*.fr.php"
If you for example want to run command on each found file, than you need to additional ()
(this will count num of lines in all found files):
find \( -name "*.en.php" -o . -name "*.fr.php" \) -exec cat {} \; | wc -l
You should be able to combine expression with an or operator, thus:
find . -name '*.en.php' -o -name '*.fr.php' ...
You can see all the operators in the man page listed under OPERATORS (and, or, not, parentheses and so forth).
Use the find -o operator, eg.
find . -name "*.en.php" -o -name "*.fr.php"
Edit:
Like so:
find . -path './Config' -prune -o \( -name "*.en.php" -o -name "*.fr.php" \)
The default operator in find (if one is ommited) is and, the parentheses group the name expression. I've added -prune to prevent find from recursing into the Config directory.