probably a simple shell question

odious1 · 03-02-2004, 09:42 AM

I am trying to use find to search for more than one pattern at a time. I want to be able to pass it as and arguemnt but cant find the proper syntax if there is a way to do it.

for example can it exclude .bkf and .$$$ somehow.

I know it can find /* \! -name *.bkf but can I pass a string argument and exclude both or even more somehow?

Thanks

rokka · 03-02-2004, 01:56 PM

Not sure I understand what you want but if you are familiar with regexps piping to grep might solve your problem.

find . | grep -E 'apattern|anotherpattern'

odious1 · 03-02-2004, 08:10 PM

thanks, i will do some reading on that. i am redirecting the stout of find to a list that is read by tar. i think i need to keep my end of line null character intact for tar, not entirely sure. please keep the ideas comming. ideally i could do something with find such as find /mnt/public -mtime 8 \! -name [arg1,arg2] > tarlist but i do not know how if it is even possible.

eccles23 · 03-02-2004, 08:26 PM

locate blah | grep -v '.bkf' | grep -v '.$$$'

this will filter out all results that contain .bkf and .$$$

and if you want to make sure it only does it to those results that actually end in those characters, then use ".bkf$" hmmm... not sure how you'd do it with the ones with $ in them though... perhaps ".$$$/$" ? but don't quote me hehe or perhaps '.\$\$\$$' ?

odious1 · 03-02-2004, 08:38 PM

thanks, that might be my answer

tearinox · 03-02-2004, 09:26 PM

cd /
ls -R > file.txt
grep [pattern] file.txt

kind of crude way, but you could then make a little bash script out of this and instantly re-search over and over quickly. Then delete the file at the end.

dford · 03-03-2004, 10:06 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by eccles23
locate blah | grep -v '.bkf' | grep -v '.$$$'

this will filter out all results that contain .bkf and .$$$

and if you want to make sure it only does it to those results that actually end in those characters, then use ".bkf$" hmmm... not sure how you'd do it with the ones with $ in them though... perhaps ".$$$/$" ? but don't quote me hehe or perhaps '.\$\$\$$' ?

The latter match for $$$ is correct: '.\$\$\$' will match any character followed by three dollar signs. If you want to only match a single period followed by three dollar signs, include a backslash before the period: '\.\$\$\$'

A shorter way to do this is to use egrep. Suppose I want a list files in the current directory excluding '.bkf' and '.$$$' files:

Code:

 ls -1 | egrep -v '(\.bkf$|\.\$\$\$$)'

Note: I am only excluding files that end in '.bkf' or '.$$$'. If that pattern occurs elsewhere in the file name, it will not be excluded.