find . and find . -depth -print
What is the difference?
-depth simply means that the contents of a directory are processed before the the directory itself:
pax> find /tmp
/tmp
/tmp/.X11-unix
/tmp/pax
/tmp/sort444444
/tmp/sort544444
/tmp/sort644444
/tmp/sort744444
/tmp/XWin.log
pax> find /tmp -depth
/tmp/.X11-unix
/tmp/pax
/tmp/sort444444
/tmp/sort544444
/tmp/sort644444
/tmp/sort744444
/tmp/XWin.log
/tmp
-print means that each item is printed to standard output. This is often the default on system where you don't specify an action but I've seen some that default to doing nothing (not very useful in my opinion).
You're probably better off (if your system supports them) explicitly using -print0 if you're going to be piping the output to xargs (and use xargs -0). This will remove problems of spaces in filenames.
Related
How to I list only directories that contain certain files. I am running on a Solaris box. Example, I want to list sub-directories of directory ABC that contain files that end with .out, .dat and .log .
Thanks
Something along these lines might work out for you:
find ABC/ \( -name "*.out" -o -name "*.log" \) -print | while read f
do
echo "${f%/*}"
done | sort -u
The sort -u bit could be just uniq instead, but either should work.
Should work on bash or ksh. Probably not so much on /bin/sh - you'd have to replace the variable expansion with something like echo "${f}" | sed -e 's;/[^/]*$;;' or something else that would strip off the last component of the path. dirname "${f}" would be good for that, but I don't recall if Solaris includes that utility...
This command will search all directories and subdirectories for files containing "text"
grep -r "text" *
How do i specify to search only in files that are named 'strings.xml'?
You'll want to use find for this, since grep won't work that way recursively (as far as I know). Something like this should work:
find . -name "strings.xml" -exec grep "text" "{}" \;
The find command searches starting in the current directory (.) for a file with the name strings.xml (-name "strings.xml"), and then for each found file, execute the grep command specified. The curly braces ("{}") are a placeholder that find uses to specify the name of the file it found. More detail can be found in man find.
Also note that the -r option to grep is no longer necessary, since find works recursively.
You can use the grep command:
grep -r "text" /path/to/dir/strings.xml
grep supports an --include option whose use is to recurse in directories only searching file matching PATTERN. So, try something like below:
grep -R --include 'strings.xml' text .
I also tried using find which seems to be quite faster than grep:
find ./ -name "strings.xml" -exec grep "text" '{}' \; -print
These links speak about the same issue, might help you:
'grep -R string *.txt' even when top dir doesn't have a .txt file
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/run-grep-only-on-certain-files-using-wildcard-919822/
Try below command
find . -type f | xargs grep "strings\.xml"
This will run grep "strings\.xml" on every file returned by find
Hi this is a simple question but the solution eludes me at the moment..
I can find out the folder name that I want to change the name of, and I know the command to change the name of a folder is mv
so from the current directory if i go
ls ~/relevant.directory.containing.directory.name.i.want.to.change
to which i get the name of the directory is called say lorem-ipsum-v1-3
but the directory name may change in the future but it is the only directory in the directory:
~/relevant.directory.containing.directory.name.i.want.to.change
how to i programmatically change it to a specific name like correct-files
i can do it normally by just doing something like
mv lorem-ipsum-v1-3 correct-files
but I want to start automating this so that I don't need to keep copying and pasting the directory name....
any help would be appreciated...
Something like:
find . -depth -maxdepth 1 -type d | head -n 1 | xargs -I '{}' mv '{}' correct-files
should work fine as long as only one directory should be moved.
If you are absolutely certain that relevant.directory.containing.directory.name.i.want.to.change only contains the directory you want to rename, then you can simply use a wildcard:
mv ~/relevant.directory.containing.directory.name.i.want.to.change/*/ ~/relevant.directory.containing.directory.name.i.want.to.change/correct-files
This can can also be simplified further, using bash brace expansion, to:
mv ~/relevant.directory.containing.directory.name.i.want.to.change/{*/,correct-files}
cd ~/relevant.directory.containing.directory.name.i.want.to.change
find . -type d -print | while read a ;
do
mv $a correct-files ;
done
Caveats:
No error handling
There may be a way of reversing the parameters to mv so you can use xargs instead of a while loop, but that's not standard (as far as I'm aware)
Not parameterised
If there any any subdirectories it won't work. The depth parameters on the find command are (again, AFAIK) not standard. They do exist on GNU versions but seem to be missing on Solaris
Probably others...
In my Mac, when I open terminal, how would I go about listing all files within a directory and subs that are NON-readonly?
The readonly part is the one i'm not sure on.
Thanks.
First define or decide what 'NON-readonly' means. Is a file that's executable not readonly? What about a file that has no permissions (it isn't readonly, but it isn't readable either).
Second, use find with appropriate options (-perm, maybe -maxdepth) to generate the list of files, and then execute grep:
find . -type f ...other controls... -exec grep -e '36 inches' {} +
The + is a recent but useful innovation. If it is not available, you could use GNU find and its -print0 piped to GNU xargs -0 instead, but GNU find supports the + notation anyway. If you don't have GNU find and GNU xargs, you may have to use plain -print and xargs, but that doesn't properly handle file names with oddball characters (spaces, newlines in particular) in the names.
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