CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexlinuxfinddigits
kouki
kouki

Reputation: 45

use find to match filenames starting with number

I am trying to find files that have only numbers in their filenames. For example, if I have the files 123.txt, 45.doc, alpha_123, beta_123.txt, 45 and 123, I only want to match files 45 and 123. I have tried various options with find and grep or combinations of them, but nothing worked as I wanted or gave me syntax errors.

Also is there any chance that I can only match for empty files? I tried using the option "empty" but also was unsuccessful, although this was probably due to using the wrong syntax.

This find . -name "[0-9]*" kind of worked, as in it found files with numbers in their filenames, for example file 123 and file 45, but it also found files with an extension, for example 123.txt and 45.doc, and unfortunately this is not what I want.

From the suggestions below (as my original question was heavily edited after answers were posted), what worked exactly as I wanted was $ find . -type f -name '[[:digit:]]*' | grep -E '.*/[0-9]+$'.

I apologise for the initial misleading/ambiguous post, I hope the edited version will prove helpful for other users also confused about how to use find with regex.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 9896

Answers (3)

reichhart
reichhart

Reputation: 889

A most compatible (BSD & Linux) invocation of find without an additional (e)grep is this:

find . -regex "\./[0-9][0-9]*"

This will find in current directory all files with names containing only digits.

And this will find the files also recursively:

find . -regex ".*/[0-9][0-9]*"

Upvotes: 1

Eric Maasdorp
Eric Maasdorp

Reputation: 19

On Debian 11 with find 4.8.0

I used

find . -type f -regextype egrep -iregex './[0-9]{1,2}_.*'

to find files in and bellow the current directory matching

./0_abc upto ./99_abc

but excluding

./000_abc

Note -iregex is case insensitive as apposed to -regex

Upvotes: -1

dawg
dawg

Reputation: 104092

Either this:

$ find -E .  -type f -regex '.*/[[:digit:]]+$'

Or this:

$ find .  -type f -name '[[:digit:]]*' | grep -E '.*/[0-9]+$'

work to find files with names composed entirely of digits (i.e., no extension)

Upvotes: 4

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