How to recursively find files with folder-specific results per line?

psion · 04-11-2014, 03:07 PM

I'm trying to figure out a way to recursively search a directory structure for files matching a specific string, and then displaying multiple matches per line, with each directory's results on a new line... So, for example, searching for files matching *index*.jpg in the following directory structure:

toplevel\ (folder where script is run)
toplevel\subfolder1\some index file.jpg
toplevel\subfolder1\another index file.jpg
toplevel\subfolder2\more index file.jpg
toplevel\subfolder2\yet another index file.jpg

would result in a list that looks something like this:

toplevel\subfolder1\:
some index file.jpg TAB another index file.jpg
toplevel\subfolder2\:
more index file.jpg TAB yet another index file.jpg

The TAB can be a | or some other text string, doesn't have to be an actual TAB, but something I can easily regex or grep on the result file.

I've been trying to work something along the lines of:

Code:

find -maxdepth 2 -name Contact*index*jpg -execdir ls -C {} \; > output.txt

but it's listing everything in a single line so I'm not quite sure how to approach this. Even the command above would work if I could somehow append a custom string after the last result in each folder, though it wouldn't be as elegant as automatically breaking each directory's results onto its own line. Can someone offer some help?

allend · 04-11-2014, 11:48 PM

I suggest wrapping the find command in a loop that looks at individual subdirectories. If you set the bash globstar shell option then the **/ pattern will only match directory names. With find, if you use the print0 option then the file names are NULL separated.

Code:

bash-4.2$ cat test.sc
#!/bin/bash

shopt -s globstar

for d in **/; do
  echo "$d"
  find ./$d -name "*index*jpg" -print0
  echo ""
done

bash-4.2$ ./test.sc
subfolder1/
./subfolder1/another index file.jpg./subfolder1/some index file.jpg
subfolder2/
./subfolder2/yet another index file.jpg./subfolder2/more index file.jpg

psion · 04-12-2014, 08:43 AM

Interesting, thank you for this. Is there a way to filter just the "file.jpg" in the result line and not show "./path/file.jpg" ? i.e. keep the path on a separate line and the files found in that path go to the line below.

allend · 04-12-2014, 11:59 AM

That was left as an exercise.

Code:

#!/bin/bash

shopt -s globstar

for d in **/; do
  echo "$d"
  cd $d
  find . -name "*index*jpg" -print0 | sed 's:\.\/::g'
  echo ""
  cd ..
done