Order of Parameters in find - unix

Should it matter in which order you specify the criteria in a find command? On Solaris,
find /my/directory ! -type d -mtime -3 -ls
doesn't find directories, but
find /my/directory -mtime -3 -ls ! -type d
does. The man page seems to state that each primary is treated in isolation as a Boolean expression, and the results just ANDed together, and that the -ls primary is just one that happens always to return TRUE.

-ls is an action for find.
When you say:
find /my/directory -mtime -3 -ls ! -type d
the part after -ls is essentially ignored and you get the same results as you'd get by saying:
find /my/directory -mtime -3 -ls

Related

Rename all subdirectories in csh shell

I'm using csh and I have a directory structure containing multiple sub-directories. I'm trying to rename all the directories and sub-directories but not the files inside these directories. So something like
From
topdir1
--dir11
--dir12
topdir2
--dir21
----dir211
--dir22
to
topdir1.test
--dir11.test
--dir12.test
topdir2.test
--dir21.test
----dir211.test
--dir22.test
I can list the directories with find . -maxdepth 3 -type d. I'm trying to use a foreach loop to rename them. So
foreach i (`find . -maxdepth 3 -type d`)
mv $i $i.test
end
But this doesn't work as once the top level directory is renamed, it cannot find the sub-directories, so it only renames the top level directories.
Any idea on how to go about this?
Thanks
How about reversing the find results so that the subdirectories are listed first?
foreach i (`find ./* -maxdepth 3 -type d | sort -r`)
mv $i $i.test
end
Sort will output the longest directory names last, using the -r (reverse) flag changes it so that the lowest directories will be listed first, and be renamed before their parent directories do.
Use the -depth option to find.
From the solaris man find page:
-depth Always true. Causes descent of the
directory hierarchy to be done so that
all entries in a directory are acted on
before the directory itself. This can
be useful when find is used with cpio(1)
to transfer files that are contained in
directories without write permission.
Why use a loop? Just let find do the work:
find . -depth -maxdepth 3 -type d -exec mv {} {}.test \;
That is not strictly portable (some implementations of find may legally not expand {}.test to the string you want, so you might prefer:
find . -depth -maxdepth 3 -type d -exec sh -c 'mv $0 $0.test' {} \;

Find files by extension

How can I modify the below command to find all files modified in last day that have extension of .log ?
Here is the command so far :
find . -mtime -1 -print
find . -name \*.log -mtime -1 -print
find . -mtime -1 -iname '*.log'
Note: Using double quotes instead of single quotes will likely give unexpected results due to shell expansion.
Use -name option to find files by particular name
find . -mtime -1 -name "*.log" -print
Notice the use of wildcard character * to find all files ending with .log

Using mtime other than with FIND

I am trying to write a script which will move files older than 1 day to an archive directory. I used the following find command:
for filename in `find /file_path/*.* -type f -mtime +1`
This fails since my argument list is too big to be handled by find. I got the following error:
/usr/bin/find: arg list too long
Is it possible to use find in an IF-ELSE statement? Can someone provide some examples of using mtime other then in find.
Edit: To add the for loop of which the find is a part.
find /file_path -name '*.*' -mtime +1 -type f |
while read filename
do ...move operation...
done
That assumes your original code was acceptable in the way it handled spaces etc in file names,
and that there is no sensible way to do the move in the action of find. It also avoids problems with overlong argument lists.
Why not just use the -exec part of find?
If you just want to cp files, you could use
find /file_path -name "." -mtime +1 -type f | xargs -i mv {} /usr/local/archived

GNU find: Search in current directory first

how can I tell find to look in the current folder first and then continue search in subfolders? I have the following:
$ find . -iname '.note'
folder/1/.note
folder/2/.note
folder/3/.note
folder/.note
What I want is this:
$ find . -iname '.note'
folder/.note
folder/1/.note
folder/2/.note
folder/3/.note
Any ideas?
find's algorithm is as follows:
For each path given on the command line, let the current entry be that path, then:
Match the current entry against the expression.
If the current entry is a directory, then perform steps 1 and 2 for every entry in that directory, in an unspecified order.
With the -depth primary, steps 1 and 2 are executed in the opposite order.
What you're asking find to do is to consider files before directories in step 2. But find has no option to do that.
In your example, all names of matching files come before names of subdirectories in the same directory, so find . -iname '.note' | sort would work. But that obviously doesn't generalize well.
One way to process non-directories before directories is to run a find command to iterate over directories, and a separate command (possibly find again) to print matching files in that directory.
find -type d -exec print-matching-files-in {} \;
If you want to use a find expression to match files, here's a general structure for the second find command to iterate only over non-directories in the specified directory, non-recursively (GNU find required):
find -type d -exec find {} -maxdepth 1 \! -type d … \;
For example:
find -type d -exec find {} -maxdepth 1 \! -type d -iname '.note' \;
In zsh, you can write
print -l **/(#i).note(Od)
**/ recurses into subdirectories; (#i) (a globbing flag) interprets what follows as a case-insensitive pattern, and (Od) (a glob qualifier) orders the outcome of recursive traversals so that files in a directory are considered before subdirectories. With (Odon), the output is sorted lexicographically within the constraint laid out by Od (i.e. the primary sort criterion comes first).
Workaround would be find . -iname '.note' | sort -r:
$ find . -iname '.note' | sort -r
folder/.note
folder/3/.note
folder/2/.note
folder/1/.note
But here, the output is just sorted in reverse order and that does not change find's behaviour.
For me with GNU find on Linux I get both orderings with different test runs.
Testcase:
rm -rf /tmp/depthtest ; mkdir -p /tmp/depthtest ; cd /tmp/depthtest ; for dir in 1 2 3 . ; do mkdir -p $dir ; touch $dir/.note ; done ; find . -iname '.note'
With this test I get the poster's first result. Note the ordering of 1 2 3 .. If I alter this ordering to to . 1 2 3
rm -rf /tmp/depthtest ; mkdir -p /tmp/depthtest ; cd /tmp/depthtest ; for dir in . 1 2 3 ; do mkdir -p $dir ; touch $dir/.note ; done ; find . -iname '.note'
I get the poster's second result.
In either case adding -depth to find does nothing.
EDIT:
I wrote a perl oneliner to look in to this further:
perl -e 'opendir(DH,".") ; print join("\n", readdir(DH)),"\n" ; closedir(DH)'
And I ran this against /tmp/depthtest after running testcase 1 with these results:
.
..
1
2
3
.note
I ran it again after testcase 2 with these results:
.
..
.note
1
2
3
Which confirms that the results are in directory order.
The -depth option to find only controls whether e.g. ./1/.note is processed before or after ./1/, not whether ./.note or ./1/ is first, so the order of the results is purely based on directory order (which is mostly creation order).
It might be helpful to look at How do I recursively list all directories at a location, breadth-first? to learn how to work around this problem.
find -s . -iname ".note" doesn't help? or find . -iname '.note'|sort ?
Find in the current folder
find ./in_save/ -type f -maxdepth 1| more
==>73!

find without recursion

Is it possible to use the find command in some way that it will not recurse into the sub-directories? For example,
DirsRoot
|-->SubDir1
| |-OtherFile1
|-->SubDir2
| |-OtherFile2
|-File1
|-File2
And the result of something like find DirsRoot --do-not-recurse -type f will be only File1, File2?
I think you'll get what you want with the -maxdepth 1 option, based on your current command structure. If not, you can try looking at the man page for find.
Relevant entry (for convenience's sake):
-maxdepth levels
Descend at most levels (a non-negative integer) levels of direc-
tories below the command line arguments. `-maxdepth 0' means
only apply the tests and actions to the command line arguments.
Your options basically are:
# Do NOT show hidden files (beginning with ".", i.e., .*):
find DirsRoot/* -maxdepth 0 -type f
Or:
# DO show hidden files:
find DirsRoot/ -maxdepth 1 -type f
I believe you are looking for -maxdepth 1.
If you look for POSIX compliant solution:
cd DirsRoot && find . -type f -print -o -name . -o -prune
-maxdepth is not POSIX compliant option.
Yes it is possible by using -maxdepth option in find command
find /DirsRoot/* -maxdepth 1 -type f
From the manual
man find
-maxdepth levels
Descend at most levels (a non-negative integer) levels of directories below the starting-points.
-maxdepth 0
means only apply the tests and actions to the starting-points themselves.

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