CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexfindposix
Jeffrey Benjamin Brown
Jeffrey Benjamin Brown

Reputation: 3709

find -regex not recognizing what seems like a good query

Using egrep, the regular expression "^.{8}$" matches any filename of exactly 8 characters:

jeff@jbb-lenovo:~/smsn+/kb/vcs/private$ ls | egrep "^.{8}$"
ac7t6-Xo
aQsqsC4-
a_wzemGk
jeff@jbb-lenovo:~/smsn+/kb/vcs/private$

But using find, whether I use posix-extended or the ordinary kind, that pattern does not work:

jeff@jbb-lenovo:~/smsn+/kb/vcs/private$ find . -regex "^.{8}$"
jeff@jbb-lenovo:~/smsn+/kb/vcs/private$ find . -regextype posix-extended -regex "^.{8}$"
jeff@jbb-lenovo:~/smsn+/kb/vcs/private$

In fact I tried all the other regextypes -- emacs, posix-basic, posix-awk, posix-egrep -- as listed here.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 38

Answers (1)

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 785226

It is not working because output of find will also include ./ before each filename since your path argument is .

You can use:

find . -regextype posix-extended -regex "^[^/]{10}$"

Or else:

find . -regextype posix-extended -regex "^\./[^/]{8}$"

use of [^/] instead of . ensures we don't match filenames in subdirectories.

Or we could use -maxdepth 1 as well to avoid matched in subdirectories: 

find . -maxdepth 1 -regextype posix-extended -regex "^\./.{8}"

Upvotes: 2

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