I have a scenario to read multiple paths in find command and to cover that i cannot enter every single path in find command. is there any way to read the paths from the file or to ask find command to read the path from the file and then execute the command to search for a file from that path which are mentioned in the read file.
command:
find path1 path2 path 30 -name \*.jks 2>/dev/null
Using bash you can read the file into an array (one line/item in array), and expand it into the first arguments for find:
readarray -t files < files.txt
find "${files[#]}" -name '*.jks'
The -t flag given to readarray will trim the trailing newline.
Just do this in a shell script :
#!/bin/bash
input="/path/to/txt/file"
paths= ""
while IFS= read -r line
do
paths="$paths $line"
done < "$input"
find $paths -name "*.txt" -print
You can replace -print by -exec to execute à task on each file found
Related
So I've a file called allTextFiles.txt in which it has paths of a all regular text file.
eg:
./test/file1.txt
./test/file2.txt
./test/file3.txt
My task is to formulate shell command such that command CAT will go through all of these paths and display content of each file.
Is it possible ?
Using xargs with the allTextFiles.txt
You can use the command cat to list the content and xargs (Xargs command documentation) to process every line of the file. For example:
cat allTextFiles.txt | xargs cat
kk #./test/file1.txt
jj #./test/file2.txt
yy #./test/file3.txt
Using find command without allTextFiles.txt
You can use the command find (find command documentation) to go trough the main folder and search recursively. Once you find a file, to use the cat command.
You achieve the purpose of showing all the content of txt files recursively with only one command.
find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec cat {} \;
kk #./test/file1.txt
jj #./test/file2.txt
yy #./test/file3.txt
Where the . means current directory. -type f only filters files. -name "*.txt" filters only files ending with .txt extension and the -exec part is where you process all the files found.
Does it cover your need?
You can use a loop; something like
while IFS= read -r file; do
cat "$file"
done < allTextFiles.txt
See Bash FAQ 001 for more discussion on reading a file a line at a time (Much of the content applies to all shells, not just bash).
If you are using bash:
readarray -t files < allTextFiles.txt
cat "${files[#]}"
is an alternative that avoids the explicit loop.
I hope you can help me with the following problem:
The Situation
I need to find files in various folders and copy them to another folder. The files and folders can contain white spaces and umlauts.
The filenames contain an ID and a string like:
"2022-01-11-02 super important file"
The filenames I need to find are collected in a textfile named ids.txt. This file only contains the IDs but not the whole filename as a string.
What I want to achieve:
I want to read out ids.txt line by line.
For every line in ids.txt I want to do a find search and copy cp the result to destination.
So far I tried:
for n in $(cat ids.txt); do find /home/alex/testzone/ -name "$n" -exec cp {} /home/alex/testzone/output \; ;
while read -r ids; do find /home/alex/testzone -name "$ids" -exec cp {} /home/alex/testzone/output \; ; done < ids.txt
The output folder remains empty. Not using -exec also gives no (search)results.
I was thinking that -name "$ids" is the root cause here. My files contain the ID + a String so I should search for names containing the ID plus a variable string (star)
As argument for -name I also tried "$ids *" "$ids"" *" and so on with no luck.
Is there an argument that I can use in conjunction with find instead of using the star in the -name argument?
Do you have any solution for me to automate this process in a bash script to read out ids.txt file, search the filenames and copy them over to specified folder?
In the end I would like to create a bash script that takes ids.txt and the search-folder and the output-folder as arguments like:
my-id-search.sh /home/alex/testzone/ids.txt /home/alex/testzone/ /home/alex/testzone/output
EDIT:
This is some example content of the ids.txt file where only ids are listed (not the whole filename):
2022-01-11-01
2022-01-11-02
2020-12-01-62
EDIT II:
Going on with the solution from tripleee:
#!/bin/bash
grep . $1 | while read -r id; do
echo "Der Suchbegriff lautet:"$id; echo;
find /home/alex/testzone -name "$id*" -exec cp {} /home/alex/testzone/ausgabe \;
done
In case my ids.txt file contains empty lines the -name "$id*" will be -name * which in turn finds all files and copies all files.
Trying to prevent empty line to be read does not seem to work. They should be filtered by the expression grep . $1 |. What am I doing wrong?
If your destination folder is always the same, the quickest and absolutely most elegant solution is to run a single find command to look for all of the files.
sed 's/.*/-o\n—name\n&*/' ids.txt |
xargs -I {} find -false {} -exec cp {} /home/alex/testzone/output +
The -false predicate is a bit of a hack to allow the list of actual predicates to start with -o (as in "or").
This could fail if ids.txt is too large to fit into a single xargs invocation, or if your sed does not understand \n to mean a literal newline.
(Here's a fix for the latter case:
xargs printf '-o\n-name\n%s*\n' <ids.txt |
...
Still the inherent problem with using xargs find like this is that xargs could split the list between -o and -name or between -name and the actual file name pattern if it needs to run more than one find command to process all the arguments.
A slightly hackish solution to that is to ensure that each pair is a single string, and then separately split them back out again:
xargs printf '-o_-name_%s*\n' <ids.txt |
xargs bash -c 'arr=("$#"); find -false ${arr[#]/-o_-name_/-o -name } -exec cp {} "$0"' /home/alex/testzone/ausgabe
where we temporarily hold the arguments in an array where each file name and its flags is a single item, and then replace the flags into separate tokens. This still won't work correctly if the file names you operate on contain literal shell metacharacters like * etc.)
A more mundane solution fixes your while read attempt by adding the missing wildcard in the -name argument. (I also took the liberty to rename the variable, since read will only read one argument at a time, so the variable name should be singular.)
while read -r id; do
find /home/alex/testzone -name "$id*" -exec cp {} /home/alex/testzone/output \;
done < ids.txt
Please try the following bash script copier.sh
#!/bin/bash
IFS=$'\n' # make newlines the only separator
set -f # disable globbing
file="files.txt" # name of file containing filenames
finish="finish" # destination directory
while read -r n ; do (
du -a | awk '{for(i=2;i<=NF;++i)printf $i" " ; print " "}' | grep $n | sed 's/ *$//g' | xargs -I '{}' cp '{}' $finish
);
done < $file
which copies recursively all the files named in files.txt from . and it's subfiles to ./finish
This new version works even if there are spaces in the directory names or file names.
I have a .txt file that contains a list of directories. I want to make a script that goes through this .txt file, copies anything in the directory thats listed of a certain file type, to another directory.
I've never done this with directories, only files.
How can i edit this simple script to work for reading a directory list, looking for a .csv file, and copy it to another directory?
cat filenames.list | \
while read FILENAME
do
find . -name "$FILENAME" -exec cp '{}' new_dir\;
done
for DIRNAME in $(dirname.list); do find $DIRNAME -type f -name "*.csv" -exec cp \{} dest \; ; done;
sorry, in my first answer i didnt understand what you asking for.
The first line of code, simply, take a dirname entry in your directory list as a path and search in it for each file which end with ".csv" extension; then copy it inside the destination you want.
But you could do with less code:
for DIRNAME in $(dirname.list); do cp $DIRNAME/*.csv dest ; done
Despite the filename of the list filenames.list, let me assume the file contains the list of directory names, not filenames. Then would you please try:
while IFS= read -r dir; do
find "$dir" -type f -name "*.mp3" -exec cp -p -- {} new_dir \;
done < filenames.list
The find command searches in "$dir" for files which have an extension .mp3 then copies them to the new_dir.
The script above does not care the duplication of the filenames. If you want to keep the original directory tree and/or need a countermeasure for the duplication of the filenames, please let me know.
Using find inside a while loop works but find will run on each line of the file, another alternative is to save the list in an array, that way find can search on the directories in the list in one search.
If you have bash4+ you can use mapfile.
mapfile -t directories < filenames.list
If you're stuck at bash3.
directories=()
while IFS= read -r line; do
directories+=("$lines")
done < filenames.list
Now if you're just after one file type like files ending in *.csv.
find "${directories[#]}" -type f -name '*.csv' -exec sh -c 'cp -v -- "$#" /newdirectory' _ {} +
If you have multiple file type to match and multiple directories to copy the files.
while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do
case $file in
*.csv) cp -v -- "$file" /foodirectory;; ##: csv file copy to foodirectory
*.mp3) cp -v -- "$file" /bardirectory;; ##: mp3 file copy to bardirectory
*.avi) cp -v -- "$file" /bazdirectory;; ##: avi file copy to bazdirectory
esac
done < <(find "${directories[#]}" -type f -print0)
find's print0 will work with read's -d '' when dealing with files with white spaces and newlines. see How can I find and deal with file names containing newlines, spaces or both?
The -- is there so if you have a problematic filename that starts with a dash - cp will not interpret it as an option.
Given find ability to process multiple folder, and assuming goal is to 'flatten' all csv files into a single destination, consider the following.
Note that it assumes folder names do not have special characters (including spaces, tabs, new lines, etc).
As a side benefit, it will minimize the number of 'cp' calls, making the process efficient across large number of files/folders.
find $(<filename.list) -name '*.csv' | xargs cp -t DESTINATION/
For the more complex case, where folder names/file name can be anything (including space, '*', etc.), consider using NUL separator (-print0 and -0).
xargs -I{} -t find '{}' -name '*.csv' <dd -print0 | xargs -0 -I{} -t cp -t new/ '{}'
Which will fork multiple find and multiple cp.
I want to write a shell script. I list my jpg files inside nested subdirectories with the following command line:
find . -type f -name "*.jpg"
How can I save the output of this command inside a variable and write a for loop for that? (I want to do some processing steps for each jpg file)
You don't want to store output containing multiple files into a variable/array and then post-process it later. You can just do those actions on the files on-the-run.
Assuming you have bash shell available, you could write a small script as
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# ^^^^ bash shell needed over any POSIX shell because
# of the need to use process-substitution <()
while IFS= read -r -d '' image; do
printf '%s\n' "$image"
# Your other actions can be done here
done < <(find . -type f -name "*.jpg" -print0)
The -print0 option writes filenames with a null byte terminator, which is then subsequently read using the read command. This will ensure the file names containing special characters are handled without choking on them.
Better than storing in a variable, use this :
find . -type f -name "*.jpg" -exec command {} \;
Even, if you want, command can be a full bloated shell script.
A demo is better than an explanation, no ? Copy paste the whole lines in a terminal :
cat<<'EOF' >/tmp/test
#!/bin/bash
echo "I play with $1 and I can replay with $1, even 3 times: $1"
EOF
chmod +x /tmp/test
find . -type f -name "*.jpg" -exec /tmp/test {} \;
Edit: new demo (from new questions from comments)
find . -type f -name "*.jpg" | head -n 10 | xargs -n1 command
(this another solution doesn't take care of filenames with newlines or spaces)
This one take care :
#!/bin/bash
shopt -s globstar
count=0
for file in **/*.jpg; do
if ((++count < 10)); then
echo "process file $file number $count"
else
break
fi
done
I'm trying to build a script that lists all the zip files in a set of directories, with some filters and get it to spit them out to file but when a filename has a space in it it seems to appear on a new line.
This list will eventually be used as an input to tar to gzip all the zip files, script is below:
#!/bin/bash
rm -f set1.txt
rm -f set2.txt
for line in $(find /home -type d -name assets ;);
do
echo $line >> set1.txt
for line in $(find $line -type f -name \*.zip -mtime +2 ;);
do
echo \"$line\" >> set2.txt
done;
This works as expected until you get a space in a filename then set2.txt contains entries like this:
"/home/xxxxxx/oldwebroot/htdocs/upload/assets/jobbags/rbjbCost"
"in"
"use"
"sept"
"2010.zip"
Does anyone know how I can get it to keep these filenames with spaces in in a single line with the whole lot wrapped in one set of quotes?
Thanks!
The correct way to loop over a set of files located via find is with a while read construct, thus:
while IFS= read -r -d '' line ; do
echo "$line" >> set1.txt
while IFS= read -r -d '' file ; do
printf '"%s"\n' "$file" >> set2.txt
done < <(find "$line" -type f -name \*.zip -mtime +2 -print0)
done < <(find /home -type d -name assets -print0)
For clarity I have given the inner loop variable a different name.
If you didn't have bash you'd have to issue the find command separately and redirect the output to a file, then read the file with while read ; do .. done < filename.
Note that each expansion of each variable is double-quoted. This is necessary.
Note also, however, that for what you want you can simply use the -printf switch to find, if you have GNU find.
find /home -type f -path '*/assets/*.zip' -mtime +2 -printf '"%p"\n' > set2.txt
Although, as #sarnold notes, this is not safe.
You should probably be executing your tar(1) command through some other mechanism; the find(1) program supports a -print0 option to request ASCII NUL-separated filename output, and the xargs(1) program supports a -0 option to tell it that the input is separated by ASCII NUL characters. (Since NUL is the only character that is not allowed in filenames, this is the only way to get reliable filename handling.)
Simply using the -print0 and -0 options will help but this still leaves the script open to another problem -- xargs(1) might decide to execute the tar(1) command two, three, or more times, depending upon its input. The last execution is the one that will "win", and the data from earlier invocations will be lost for ever. (This is useless as a backup.)
So you should also look into adding the --concatenate command line option to tar(1), too, so that it will add to the archive. It might make sense to perform the compression after all the files have been added, via gzip(1) or bzip2(1). (This does mean you need to remove the archive before a "fresh run" of this script.)