Find files in directory with paired names

I’m running tests of a variable-size-and-contents test set. Data files are added and removed frequently. I’m looking for an automated way of gathering a file list.

All files are in subdirectories of D; I need the full directory and name added to a text file. However, I only need those files that have a “paired” file, which has the same filename but a different extension (so… different filename, but in a structured way). So, if there is a MyFileName.A and MyFileName.B, then I want D/.../MyFileName added to the file list.

There are .A files without .B files, but no .B files without .A files. If a .A has a .B file, then both files are in the same directory.

Any advice?

Answers:

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Method 1

If none of the filenames contain any newlines, you can do:

find D -type f ( -name '*.A' -o -name '*.B' ) |
  sed 's/.[^.]*$//' |
  sort |
  uniq -d >paired_files

This should work in the more general case where there are .B files without .A files.

To handle any filename using recent GNU tools:

find D -type f ( -name '*.A' -o -name '*.B' ) -print0 |
  sed -z 's/.[^.]*$//' |
  sort -z |
  uniq -dz |
  tr '' 'n' >paired_files

Method 2

If you statement is true “there are no .B files without .A files.”, then get a list of .B files and remove the extension.

find $directory-to-search -name "*.B" | sed -r -e "s~(.*).B~1~g"

Method 3

With zsh:

print -rl mydir/**/*.A(.e_'REPLY=$REPLY:r; [[ -f $REPLY.B ]]'_)

:r removes the extension, so if the content of $REPLY was mydir/somedir/somefile.A after running REPLY=$REPLY:r its content becomes mydir/somedir/somefile;
the rest is similar to this answer.

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