CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexlinuxbashshellunix
Mohan
Mohan

Reputation: 141

Regular Expression in Find command

I want to list out the files which starts with a number and ends with ".c" extension. The following is the find command which is used. But, it does not give the expected output.

Command: 

find -type f -regex "^[0-9].*\\.c$"

Upvotes: 2

Views: 13314

Answers (2)

Jean-Baptiste Yunès
Jean-Baptiste Yunès

Reputation: 36391

Just use -name option. It accepts pattern for the last component of the path name as the doc says:

-name pattern

         True if the last component of the pathname being examined matches
         pattern.  Special shell pattern matching characters (``['',
         ``]'', ``*'', and ``?'') may be used as part of pattern.  These
         characters may be matched explicitly by escaping them with a
         backslash (``\'').

So:

$ find -type f -name "[0-9]*.c"

should work.

Upvotes: 2

ColOfAbRiX
ColOfAbRiX

Reputation: 1059

It's because the regex option works with the full path and you specified only the file name. From man find:

   -regex pattern
         File name matches regular expression pattern.  This is a match on the whole
         path, not a search.  For example, to match a file named './fubar3', you can use
         the  regular  expression  '.*bar.'  or  '.*b.*3',  but  not 'f.*r3'. 
         The regular expressions understood by find are by default Emacs Regular
         Expressions, but this can be changed with the -regextype option.

Try with this:

find -type f -regex ".*/[0-9][^/]+\.c$"

where you explicitly look for a string where "the format of your filename follows any string that terminates with a slash"

UPDATE: I made a correction to the regex. I changed .* in the filename to [^\]+ as after "any string that terminates with a slash" we don't want to find a slash in that part of the string because it wouldn't be a filename but another directory!

NOTE: The matching .* can be very harmful...

Upvotes: 2

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