topic find command with wildcards in Operating System - HP-UX

find command with wildcards

Werner Placke — Tue, 20 Nov 2001 11:50:54 GMT

hy admin's
i'll try to write my first shell script. I search for files in a directorytree which ended with htm, html, doc or pdf. The command ls /path *.@(htm|html|doc|pdf) shows the right files, but in a wrong output. Therefor i want to use the command find. With the commandline :
find /path -type f -iname '*.htm' -printf '\n %P' i get the right output, but the wildcards like in the ls-command don't work.
Where is my problem!

Re: find command with wildcards

Duncan Edmonstone — Tue, 20 Nov 2001 11:56:16 GMT

Try using double quotes

"*.html"

Re: find command with wildcards

Victor BERRIDGE — Tue, 20 Nov 2001 11:59:24 GMT

Hi,
You will have to use with find -o (OR):
find / \( -name \*.htm -o -name \*.html etc...

All the best

Victor

Re: find command with wildcards

Praveen Bezawada — Tue, 20 Nov 2001 12:08:14 GMT

Hi

ls /path/*.@(html|html|pdf) is working for me.
I think you may have missed the second /

...BPK...

Re: find command with wildcards

Roger Baptiste — Tue, 20 Nov 2001 12:31:20 GMT

This should work :
find /path \( -name "*.htm" -o -name "*.html" -o -name "*.doc" -name "*.pdf" \) -print

This should also work:

find /path |grep -e "*.html" -e "*.doc" -e "*.pdf" -e "*.htm"

-raj

Re: find command with wildcards

David Lodge — Tue, 20 Nov 2001 12:52:57 GMT

This is a problem with the way the shell intreprets things.

In the shell the wildcard pattern (called a glob) is parsed by the shell *before* it is passed to the command, you can see this by typing set -x before running a command:
ls !(lost+found)
print !(lost+found)

In the case of you find line - as soon as you quote a CLI parameter, whether using single or double quoting then the parameter isn't checked for globs eg try:
ls '!(lost+found)'
(the difference between " and ' is variable expansion - it will be expanded when the variable is between " but not when between ')

Find, according to the manual page uses regular expressions (which are not the same as globs) - this are wrong. Find uses globs, but *not the same globs as the shell.*

The standard glob characters are:
* - match 0 or more characters
? - match exactly one character
[] - match one of the characters in the []

Korn Shell (and POSIX shell) add several other globs eg:
!() - find any filename not in the brackets
+() - find one or more filenames in the brackets

Find uses non-korn shell globs - ie only *,? and []...

The best solution for your problem is the following line:

find /path -type f \( -name '*.htm' -o -name '*.html' -o '*.pdf' -o '*.doc' \) -print

dave

Re: find command with wildcards

Werner Placke — Tue, 20 Nov 2001 13:07:05 GMT

Thank you very much! All the uggestions works fine. A special thanks to David Lodge for the explanation!

Werner

Re: find command with wildcards

Deepak Extross — Tue, 20 Nov 2001 13:21:51 GMT

Werner,
Since you mention that the output of 'ls' is correct, let me point out that there is a fundamental difference between 'ls' and 'find'.
While 'ls /path' will only list files or directories in /path, find will search recursively in all subdirectories within /path.
For this reason, the list of files retrieved by these two commands may differ not just in format but in content as well.
Be sure of what you are looking for before you decide to use one or the other.
Good Luck.