Using find to locate files that match one of multiple patterns

Question

I was trying to get a list of all python and html files in a directory with the command find Documents -name     py html     Then along came the man page      Braces within the pattern            are not considered to be special  that is  find   -name  foo 1 2   matches a file named foo 1 2   not the files foo1 and foo2    As this is part of a pipe-chain  I d like to be able to specify which extensions it matches at runtime  no hardcoding    If find just can t do it  a perl one-liner  or similar  would be fine   Edit  The answer I eventually came up with include all sorts of crap  and is a bit long as well  so I posted it as an answer to the original itch I was trying to scratch   Feel free to hack that up if you have better solutions

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I had a similar need   This worked for me   find           -iname  tmp  -o -iname  vendor     -prune -o    -iname     rb  -o -iname    rjs     -print

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Use -o  which means  or    find Documents    -name    py  -o -name    html         You d need to build that command line programmatically  which isn t that easy   Are you using bash  or Cygwin on Windows    If you are  you should be able to do this   ls      py      html   which might be easier to build programmatically

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My default has been   find -type f   egrep -i    java   css   cs   sql   Like the less process intencive find execution by Brendan Long and Stephan202 et al       find Documents    -name    py  -or -name    html

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Braces within the pattern      is required for name pattern with or  find Documents -type f    -name    py  -or -name    html       While for the name pattern with and operator it is not required  find Documents -type f   -name    py  -and   -name    html

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Some editions of find  mostly on linux systems  possibly on others aswell support -regex and -regextype options  which finds files with names matching the regex   for example  find   -regextype posix-egrep -regex       py html       should do the trick in the above example  However this is not a standard POSIX find function and is implementation dependent

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bin bash filetypes    py   xml  for type in  filetypes do find Documents -name   type  done   simple but works

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You could programmatically add more -name clauses  separated by -or   find Documents    -name    py  -or -name    html       Or  go for a simple loop instead   for F in Documents    py html   do    something with each   F       done

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This will find all  c or  cpp files on linux    find   -name    c  -o -name    cpp    You don t need the escaped parenthesis unless you are doing some additional mods   Here from the man page they are saying if the pattern matches  print it   Perhaps they are trying to control printing   In this case the -print acts as a conditional and becomes an  AND d  conditional   It will prevent any  c files from being printed     find    -name    c  -o -name    cpp   -print   But if you do like the original answer you can control the printing   This will find all  c files as well     find      -name    c  -o -name    cpp     -print   One last example for all c c   source files    find      -name    c  -o -name    cpp   -o -name    h  -o -name    hpp     -print

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This works on AIX korn shell   find   cbl   dms -prune -type f -mtime -1   This is looking for   cbl or   dms which are 1 day old  in current directory only  skipping the sub-directories

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I needed to remove all files in child dirs except for some files  The following worked for me  three patterns specified    find   -depth -type f -not -name   itp -and -not -name  ane gro -and -not -name   top -exec rm

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What about  ls    py   html    It lists out all the files ending with  py or  html in their filenames

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find MyDir -iname     j  p  g     find MyDir -iname     b  m  p     find MyDir -iname     jb  pm  gp

[shell] Using find to locate files that match one of multiple patterns

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