Within a set of directories, how do I find a file whose name includes a given string, such as “abcde”?
Answers:
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Method 1
find will look through a directory structure and return results based on a glob:
find /your/dir -name "*abcde*"
Adding the -type f switch will refine your search criteria to only return files.
find /your/dir -type f -name "*abcde*"
You could also include other switches like -maxdepth 2 to restrict the search to 2 levels of directories bellow the specified one.
In this way you can build up a rich, highly targetted search command that will quickly return exactly what you need.
man find has a wealth of detail, including actions like -exec to run a command on the files returned by find and options to use regular expressions.
Method 2
Use find:
find path-to-search -name '*abcde*'
Method 3
If locate suits you (it is fast, but only as good as the most recent run of sudo updatedb). You can run locate using its own built-in regex facility…
Here is a parameter driven script to do what you want. Call it with $1 as the “abcde” you are looking for and with subsequent parameters as the directories:
#!/bin/bash
a=("[email protected]"); r=''
for ((i=1;i<${#a[@]};i++)); do r="$r|${a[i]}"; done
locate --regex "(${r:1}).*/[^/]*${a[0]}[^/]*$"
An example call looks like this:
$ ./script_name 'z' "$HOME/bin/perl" "$HOME/type/stuff"
As suggested by jasonwryan, here is a commented version of the script.
Bear in mind that locate always outputs fully-qualified paths.
#!/bin/bash
# Note: Do not use a trailing / for directory names
#
# Any of the args can be an extended regex pattern.
#
# Create an array `a` which contains "$1", "$2", "$3", etc... (ie. "<a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="2d096d">[email protected]</a>")
# writing the $-args to an array like this (using quotes) solves
# any possible problem with embedded whitespace
a=("<a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="85a1c5">[email protected]</a>")
#
# Set up an empty string which is to be built into a regex pattern
# of all directroy names (or an appropriate regex pattern)
r=''
#
# Each regex pattern is to be an extended regex
# Each regex pattern is concatenated to the preceding one
# with the extended-regex 'or' operator |
#
# Step through the array, starting at index 1 (ie, $2),
# and build the 'regex-pattern' for the directories
for ((i=1;i<${#a[@]};i++)); do r="$r|${a[i]}"; done
#
# Run 'locate' with
# |the target file pattern $1 |
# |zero-to-| |preceded and followed by |
# |-many | |zero-to-many non-slash chars|
# |anything| | |‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
# ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾|| | |
locate --regex "(${r:1}).*/[^/]*${a[0]}[^/]*$"
# ________| | |
# |directory-regex| last
# | in brackets ()| slash
# |stripped of its|
# |leading "|" |
#
Method 4
locate abcde | egrep "(dirA|dirB|dirC)"
for the set of directories dirA, dirB, dirC.
Or 3 find-commands.
All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0