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Old 06-10-2007, 12:49 PM   #1
babag
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unwanted characters returned with bash find - how to remove?


this finds the first fiile in a directory:

find . -name "something-to-identify-with*" | sort -n | head -n 1

and this finds the last file:

find . -name "something-to-identify-with*" | sort -nr | head -n 1


one question: the directory i tested contains files in the naming
format:

Budgies_12345.bmp


the return from my cmd line is :

./Budgies_12345.bmp


what's with the ./? is there some simple syntaxing i
can use that will eliminate this from what is returned?

thanks,
BabaG
 
Old 06-10-2007, 02:31 PM   #2
druuna
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Hi,

You can call it a reference point.

You used find ., which says from the dir I'm in and all subdirs. If you would have used find /path/to/dir the output would have been /path/to/dir/Budgies_12345.bmp instead of ./Budgies_12345.bmp

Ok, that explains why it's there.

To answer your question:

One way of removing it is this (using sed):

find . -name "something-to-identify-with*" | sed 's%\./%%' | sort -nr | head -n 1

Hope this helps.
 
Old 06-10-2007, 02:35 PM   #3
babag
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thanks druuna. also got this from dawkcid:

basename $(find . -name "something-to-identify-with*" | sort -n | head -n 1)

thanks again,
BabaG
 
Old 06-10-2007, 02:39 PM   #4
druuna
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Hi,

basename will work, but if you have a deeper directory tree things could go wrong (depending on what you want to do). If the following is found: ./X/Y/somefile, basename will return somefile. It will also return somefile for the following: ./X/Y/Z/somefile.

But like I said, it all depends on what you want to do with the output.

Hope this clears things up.
 
Old 06-10-2007, 03:23 PM   #5
babag
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interesting. thanks!

BabaG
 
Old 06-10-2007, 10:36 PM   #6
ghostdog74
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if you don't mind full path names, you can also use full path
Code:
find $(pwd) -name "something-to-identify-with*" | sort -nr | head -n 1
 
  


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