128

Often I have a file name and it's partial path, e.g. "content/docs/file.xml".

Is there a simple way to search for that file, without manually cutting into parts its name to provide directory name and file name separately?

It'd be great if find worked in that way, so I could run find content/docs/file.xml, but unfortunately it doesn't.

slhck
  • 235,242

5 Answers5

147

Pass in a * wildcard to indicate a match for anything. You also need to escape the *s, e.g.:

find . -path \*content/docs/file.xml

or enclose the pattern in quotes, e.g.:

find . -path "*content/docs/file.xml"

As the man page describes it:

$ find . -name *.c -print

find: paths must precede expression

This happens because *.c has been expanded by the shell resulting in find actually receiving a command line like this:

find . -name bigram.c code.c frcode.c locate.c -print

That command is of course not going to work. Instead of doing things this way, you should enclose the pattern in quotes or escape the wild‐ card:

$ find . -name \*.c -print

Bob
  • 63,170
16

find has a -path (or the equivalent but less portable -wholename) option too find $top_dir -wholename *string*

find /usr -path *in/abiw*

>/usr/bin/abiword
technosaurus
  • 1,112
4
find . -type f | grep "content/docs/file.xml"

or just

locate content/docs/file.xml
Nifle
  • 34,998
2

If you dont want to stay posix-compliant, at least on Linux you can also use the -regex (and -regextype) option for this purpose.

For instance:

find folder/ -regextype posix-extended -regex "(.*/)?deer/(.*/)?beer"

will match

folder/deer/beer
folder/deer/dir/forest/beer/
folder/forest/deer/dir/forest/beer/

etc.

See linux man for details.

0

For example searching files in a location using asterisk/wildcard (*) as: dir=“/apps/*/instance01/" you could use find ${dir} -name “*.jks”. putting all the files in an array like this:

arr=(`find ${dir} -name “*.jks"`)

if you want to get files with other extensions use ‘or’ like this:

-name "*.keystore" -o -name "*.jks" -o -name “*.p12" because -name only accepts single string so use ‘or’.

Finally put everything in array like this:

arr=(`find ${dir} -name "*.keystore" -o -name "*.jks" -o -name "*.p12"`)

if you have full paths not the partial paths its much easier to put them in arrays like this:

arr=(“/Users/ajay/Documents/keystore_and_p12files/"*.{keystore,p12,jks})
kenorb
  • 26,615