[Chapter 17] 17.4 Looking for Files with Particular Names
Author: Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly & Mike Loukides
Date: 1998-08-04T21:38:18Z

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| Chapter 17 Finding Files with find |

## 17.4 Looking for Files with Particular Names

You can look for particular files by using a regular expression with metacharacters (shell wildcards, not grep-like expressions (26.2)) as an argument to the -name operator. Because the shell also understands these metacharacters, it is necessary to quote (8.14) them so they are passed to find unchanged. Any kind of quoting can be used:

>     % find . -name \*.o -print
>     % find . -name '*.o' -print
>     % find . -name "[a-zA-Z]*.o" -print

Any directory along the path to the file is not matched with the -name operator, merely the name at the end of the path. For example, the commands above would not match the pathname ./subdir.o/afile-but they would match ./subdir.o and ./src/subdir/prog.o.

csh_init sh_init | Article 17.24 shows a way to match directories in the middle of a path. [Here's a "find file" alias:

>     alias ff "find . -name '*\!{*}*' -ls"

Give it a file or directory name; the alias will give a long listing of any file or directory names that contain the argument. For example:

>     % ff makedirs
>     415863  3 -rw-r--r--  1 359   daemon    2072 Feb 19  1994 ./adir/makedirs.sh

Very handy. -JP ]

- BB

17.3 Don't Forget -print |  | 17.5 Searching for Old Files