Reputation: 3162

How to grep for a file extension

I am currently trying to a make a script that would grep input to see if something is of a certain file type (zip for instance), although the text before the file type could be anything, so for instance

something.zip
this.zip
that.zip

would all fall under the category. I am trying to grep for these using a wildcard, and so far I have tried this

grep ".*.zip"

But whenever I do that, it will find the .zip files just fine, but it will still display output if there are additional characters after the .zip so for instance .zippppppp or .zipdsjdskjc would still be picked up by grep. Having said that, what should I do to prevent grep from displaying matches that have additional characters after the .zip?

Upvotes: 38

Answers (11)

Stryker

Reputation: 6120

You can also use grep to find all files with a specific extension:

find .|grep -e "\.gz$"

The . means the current folder. If you want to specify a folder other than the current folder, just replace the . with the path of the folder. Here is an example: Let's find all files that end with .gz and are in the folder /var/log

  find /var/log/ |grep -e "\.gz$"

The output is something similar to the following:

 ✘ ⚙> find /var/log/ |grep -e "\.gz$"

/var/log//mail.log.1.gz
/var/log//mail.log.0.gz
/var/log//system.log.3.gz
/var/log//system.log.7.gz
/var/log//system.log.6.gz
/var/log//system.log.2.gz
/var/log//system.log.5.gz
/var/log//system.log.1.gz
/var/log//system.log.0.gz
/var/log//system.log.4.gz

The $ sign says that the file extension is ending with gz

Upvotes: 8

Student

Reputation: 353

On UNIX, try:

find . -type f -name \*.zip

Upvotes: 21

Marcjin Sznurkowskl

Reputation: 91

grep -r pattern --include="*.txt" /path/to/dir/

Upvotes: 4

Ayyappa

Reputation: 1984

If you just want to find in the current folder, why not with this simple command without grep ?

ls *.zip

Upvotes: 2

index opout

Reputation: 51

I use this to get a listing of the file types inside a folder.

find . -type f | egrep -i -E -o "\.{1}\w*$" | sort -su

Outputs for example:

.DS_Store
.MP3
.aif
.aiff
.asd
.doc
.flac
.jpg
.m4a
.m4p
.m4r
.mp3
.pdf
.png
.txt
.wav
.wma
.zip

BONUS: with

find . -type f | egrep -i -E -o "\.{1}\w*$" | sort | uniq -c

You'll get the file count:

    106 .DS_Store
     35 .MP3
     89 .aif
      5 .aiff
    525 .asd
      1 .doc
     60 .flac
     48 .jpg
    149 .m4a
     11 .m4p
      1 .m4r
  12844 .mp3
      1 .pdf
      5 .png
      9 .txt
    108 .wav
     44 .wma
      2 .zip

Upvotes: 5

twasbrillig

Reputation: 18831

Just reviewing some of the other answers. The .* isn't necessary, and if you're looking for a certain file extension, it's best to include -i so that it's case-insensitive; in case the file is HELLO.ZIP, for example. I don't think the quotes are necessary, either.

grep -i \.zip$

Upvotes: 2

browseman

Reputation: 21

One more fix/addon of the above example:

# multi-dotted/multiple extensions
grep -oEi "(\\.([A-z0-9])+)+" file.txt

# single dotted
grep -oEi "\\.([A-z0-9])+$" file.txt

This will get file extensions like '.mp3' and etc.

Upvotes: 2

Chris Seymour

Reputation: 85785

Test for the end of the line with $ and escape the second . with a backslash so it only matches a period and not any character.

grep ".*\.zip$"

However ls *.zip is a more natural way to do this if you want to list all the .zip files in the current directory or find . -name "*.zip" for all .zip files in the sub-directories starting from (and including) the current directory.

Upvotes: 87

dsrdakota

Reputation: 2553

Try: grep -o -E "(\\.([A-z])+)+"

I used this to get multi-dotted/multiple extensions. So if the input was hello.tar.gz, then it would output .tar.gz. For single dotted, use grep -o -E "\\.([A-z])+$". Tested on Cygwin/MingW+MSYS.

Upvotes: 2