Hi friends,

I am having trouble in using find command. The situation is as follows:

I have 2 different files. Filenames of two different files are as follows:

file12
file123

file12 is present in /home/manoj/test1 folder and file123 in /home/manoj/test2 folder.

Main issue is - how to search for file12 or file123 from home path ?
My search is based on input string with integers.

For example, if I search with file name like 12, it should return file12 and if i provide my input string as 123, it should return file123.

Please suggest.

Code:

find /home/manoj -type f -regex 'file\d\d\d?' -print

Edit:
Just realized you want an input string:

Code:

read input
find /home/manoj -type f -regex "file${input}" -print

Edit2:
Sorry, forgot the anchors. This is better (see post #3):

@byannoni, your find command is not working as expected here (centos 6.2 and gentoo). It's weird why is like that but the following should work fine:

HTH

find is a tricky command with lots of options, and it takes some time to learn. Start with these links:

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/UsingFind
http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Find.html

Note that the -name option uses globbing (not exactly the shell globbing in the link, but broadly the same), and only tries to match the filename itself, not the path in front of it. The -regex option used above, OTOH, uses more powerful regular expressions, and attempts to match the entire input filepath.

Assuming the filenames are exactly as posted, with the number occurring at the end of the name, globbing matches could look like this:
The [^0-9] ensures that the expression matches the number exactly, and won't also match "file 212", and similar.

find has several other matching features. Read the man page for them all.

1 members found this post helpful.

How exactly is it "not working as expected"? How can we tell you what's wrong without knowing what happened?

You do realize that the read command is there to ask for user input first, right? So you type in "12" after running the first command, and that's inserted into the find command for searching.

Note also that the regex here really should have a number limiter too. Try this:

The regex will also match names like:

• badfile12
• file123bad
• dontwantthisfile123

because it is not anchored to the beginning and end of the name.

oh, yes I do know what 'read' is . by 'not working as expected' I meant that it is not working at all the find command given by @byannoni.

yes, I agree that it is even more precise with the number delimiter between them.

I found this working perfectly:

find /home/manoj -type f -name "*[^0-9]12" -print
find /home/manoj -type f -name "*[^0-9]123" -print

--
Thanks a lot