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 have a folder with 20k plus Images and most gui filemanagers (like dolphin) aren't able to manage this amount of data.
So I decided to use the bash instead. My problem is the following:
most of the files are *.IMG or *.LBL files
I am not interested in those files. I look for the others
with find . -type f -not -name "*.LBL" I am able to see all files instead of the *.LBL
with find . -type f -not -name "*.IMG" I am able to see all files instead of the *.IMG
both is not very helpful, since it still fills my terminal
either combining both seems not to work:
find . -type f -not -name "*.LBL" -o -not -name "*.IMG"
What is the correct way to see the files inside a folder excluding multiple filesuffixes?
Group conditions, I think -o -not isn't working as expected. Try this:
find . -type f -not \( -name "*.LBL" -o -name "*.IMG" \)
You can use bash's extended pattern matching (Might have to be turned on in a script with shopt -s extglob; usually enabled by default in an interactive shell):
printf "%s\n" !(*.LBL|*.IMG)
I tried this:
find . \( -name ".?" -o -name ".??" -o -name ".???" -o -name ".????" -o -name ".?????" -o -name ".??????" \)
But it didn't work
You can do it your way, by explicitly putting all the possible combinations. But that is cumbersome when you have many, or when you have to modify it. There are simpler, parameterized ways, to do that.
One way would be using regular expressions:
find . -regextype posix-egrep -regex ".*/\..{1,7}"
If your find does not support regular expressions, another easy way would be to filter the output of find with the help of awk:
find . -name ".*" | awk -F"/" 'length($NF)<8 {print}'
Your command works fine. But there are shorter alternatives. E.g.:
find . -name '.*' ! -name '.???????*'
I'm using the following command to find specific file extensions within folders,sub-sub-sub folders etc. However, it also return results if a folder/directory that has that particular keyword as well. How can I bypass this?
find . \( -type d -a ! -name 'downloading' -a ! -name 'vntdone' -a ! -name '.' \) -o -name \*.avi -o -name \*.mkv -o -name \*.mp4 -o -name \*.VOB
Any kind of help I can get on this is greatly appreciated! Thank you.
I am not quite sure I understand the need for your first parameters, but is this what you're looking for?
find . -type f \( -name \*.avi -o -name \*.mkv -o -name \*.mp4 -o -name \*.VOB \)
This will output files names ending with avi, mkv, mp4 and VOB
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.