I need some help, I'm creating a script with the purpose of going through a text file line by line and validating it with the images of a folder.
My doubt is: when I search for images, I only want the number not the extension.
find /mnt/62-PASTA/01.GERAL/ -mindepth 2 | head -19 | cut -d/ -f6
I get:
111066.jpg
88008538.jpg
11241.jpg
88008563.jpg
116071.PNG
But I want
111066
88008538
11241
88008563
116071
Any help?
A really simple way given the examples shown would be to use cut again to split on .:
find /mnt/62-PASTA/01.GERAL/ -mindepth 2 | head -19 | cut -d/ -f6 | cut -d'.' -f1
What we can do here is use another cut command.
cut -d .
Now this will give me strings separated by . as delimiter. Then we can grab all but last part as below.
cut -d . -f 1
I think this should work.Check below link for additional details.
Suggesting sed pipe instead of cut
find /mnt/62-PASTA/01.GERAL/ -mindepth 2 | sed 's|\.[[:alpha:]]*$||'
With pure shell solution, try following solution. Simple explanation would be, using a for loop to loop through .jpg, .PNG format files in your current directory. Then in main loop, using bash's capability to perform substitution and substitute everything apart from digits with NULL in file's name which will give only digits from file's names.
Running code from directory/mnt/62-PASTA/01.GERAL/:
for file in *.jpg *.PNG;
do
echo "${file//[^0-9]/}"
done
OR with full path(/mnt/62-PASTA/01.GERAL/) to run from any other path try following code:
for file in /mnt/62-PASTA/01.GERAL/*.jpg /mnt/62-PASTA/01.GERAL/*.PNG;
do
file1="${file##*/}" ##Removing values till / to get only filename.
echo "${file1//[^0-9]/}" ##Removing everything apart from digits in filename.
done
Output will be as follows:
111066
11241
88008538
88008563
116071
I am needing pipe this result:
grep -R "extends Some_Critical_Class" *
to another grep:
grep "function init("
ie. "files that extend Some_Critical_Class that also have function init()"
If there is a way to do it in one operation in grep, that would be great, but I'd also like to see the how the piping is done to improve my programming in *nix (which is rudimentary right now). Thanks.
To be clear, you want the list of files that contain both strings. Not only you need two greps for this, but you also need the -l (a.k.a. --files-with-matches) option.
Here is one way of doing this:
grep -F -R -l -Z "extends Some_Critical_Class" . \
| xargs -0 grep -F -l "function init("
We first obtain a (NUL-delimited) list of files that contain your first string, and then we use xargs to pass this list of files to the second grep.
Don't use grep (g/re/p) to find files, adding that functionality to GNU grep was just a bad idea since there's already a perfectly good tool to find files with an extremely obvious name.
You didn't say what your expected output was but maybe this does what you want:
find . -type f -exec \
awk '
/extends Some_Critical_Class/ { x=1 }
/function init\(/ { y=1 }
END { if (x && y) print FILENAME }
' {} \;
The above will work on any Unix box, not just one with GNU tools, and can be trivially modified to add more regexps or strings to search for, various "and" and "or" combinations, etc.
I have a list of sample names in text format e.g.
Sample1
Sample2
etc....
Im trying to find and copy files with these names and a specific extension using the below one liner
find ./ | egrep fq.gz | fgrep -f list.txt | perl -ne 'chomp; system "cp $_ /data/copy_of_files/"'
No errors are thrown up but nothing is copied.
This line works until I pass the output to perl (list of correct files prints in termial from the fgrep) so I think my issue is with the perl section...
any suggestions?
Both your original command and this command worked for me:
find . -name '*.gz' | fgrep -f list.txt | \
perl -ne 'chomp; system("cp $_ <DIR>");'
Have you verified that your user or group have write permissions to /data/copy_of_files?
Suggestions:
Don't use Perl here, but instead, create a pipeline that just spits
out the cp commands. As soon as you're satisfied with what you
see, append | sh -x.
Be absolutely sure that none of your file names contain whitespace or other characters special to the shell. If some do, but only a little (e.g. only spaces), you may get by with appropriate quoting in the cp commands, but if anything is possible in filenames, a different approach will be required, and I would probably write the whole thing in Perl using File::Find::Rule.
I am trying to do a simple operation here. Which is to cut a few characters from one file (style.css) do a find a replace on another file (client_custom.css) for more then 100 directories with different names
When I use the following command
for d in */; do sed -n 73p ~/assets/*/style.css | cut -c 29-35 | xargs -I :hex: sed -i 's/!BGCOLOR!/:hex:/' ~/assets/*/client_custom.css $d; done
It keeps giving me the following error for all the directories
sed: couldn't edit dirname/: not a regular file
I am confused on why its giving me that error message explicitly gave the full path to the file. It works perfectly fine without a for loop.
Can anyone please help me out with this issue?
sed doesn't support folders as input.
for d in */;
puts folders into $d. If you write sed ... $d, then BASH will put the folder name into the arguments of sed and the poor tool will be confused.
Also ~/assets/*/client_custom.css since this will expand to all the files which match this pattern. So sed will be called once with all file names. You probably want to invoke sed once per file name.
Try
for f in ~/assets/*/client_custom.css; do
... | sed -i 's/!BGCOLOR!/:hex:/' $f
done
or, even better:
for f in ~/assets/*/client_custom.css; do
... | sed 's/!BGCOLOR!/:hex:/' "${f}.in" > "${f}"
done
(which doesn't overwrite the output file). This way, you can keep the "*.in" files, edit them with the patterns and then use sed to "expand" all the variables.
I'm trying to copy a bunch of files below a directory and a number of the files have spaces and single-quotes in their names. When I try to string together find and grep with xargs, I get the following error:
find .|grep "FooBar"|xargs -I{} cp "{}" ~/foo/bar
xargs: unterminated quote
Any suggestions for a more robust usage of xargs?
This is on Mac OS X 10.5.3 (Leopard) with BSD xargs.
You can combine all of that into a single find command:
find . -iname "*foobar*" -exec cp -- "{}" ~/foo/bar \;
This will handle filenames and directories with spaces in them. You can use -name to get case-sensitive results.
Note: The -- flag passed to cp prevents it from processing files starting with - as options.
find . -print0 | grep --null 'FooBar' | xargs -0 ...
I don't know about whether grep supports --null, nor whether xargs supports -0, on Leopard, but on GNU it's all good.
The easiest way to do what the original poster wants is to change the delimiter from any whitespace to just the end-of-line character like this:
find whatever ... | xargs -d "\n" cp -t /var/tmp
This is more efficient as it does not run "cp" multiple times:
find -name '*FooBar*' -print0 | xargs -0 cp -t ~/foo/bar
I ran into the same problem. Here's how I solved it:
find . -name '*FoooBar*' | sed 's/.*/"&"/' | xargs cp ~/foo/bar
I used sed to substitute each line of input with the same line, but surrounded by double quotes. From the sed man page, "...An ampersand (``&'') appearing in the replacement is replaced by the string matching the RE..." -- in this case, .*, the entire line.
This solves the xargs: unterminated quote error.
This method works on Mac OS X v10.7.5 (Lion):
find . | grep FooBar | xargs -I{} cp {} ~/foo/bar
I also tested the exact syntax you posted. That also worked fine on 10.7.5.
Just don't use xargs. It is a neat program but it doesn't go well with find when faced with non trivial cases.
Here is a portable (POSIX) solution, i.e. one that doesn't require find, xargs or cp GNU specific extensions:
find . -name "*FooBar*" -exec sh -c 'cp -- "$#" ~/foo/bar' sh {} +
Note the ending + instead of the more usual ;.
This solution:
correctly handles files and directories with embedded spaces, newlines or whatever exotic characters.
works on any Unix and Linux system, even those not providing the GNU toolkit.
doesn't use xargs which is a nice and useful program, but requires too much tweaking and non standard features to properly handle find output.
is also more efficient (read faster) than the accepted and most if not all of the other answers.
Note also that despite what is stated in some other replies or comments quoting {} is useless (unless you are using the exotic fishshell).
Look into using the --null commandline option for xargs with the -print0 option in find.
For those who relies on commands, other than find, eg ls:
find . | grep "FooBar" | tr \\n \\0 | xargs -0 -I{} cp "{}" ~/foo/bar
find | perl -lne 'print quotemeta' | xargs ls -d
I believe that this will work reliably for any character except line-feed (and I suspect that if you've got line-feeds in your filenames, then you've got worse problems than this). It doesn't require GNU findutils, just Perl, so it should work pretty-much anywhere.
I have found that the following syntax works well for me.
find /usr/pcapps/ -mount -type f -size +1000000c | perl -lpe ' s{ }{\\ }g ' | xargs ls -l | sort +4nr | head -200
In this example, I am looking for the largest 200 files over 1,000,000 bytes in the filesystem mounted at "/usr/pcapps".
The Perl line-liner between "find" and "xargs" escapes/quotes each blank so "xargs" passes any filename with embedded blanks to "ls" as a single argument.
Frame challenge — you're asking how to use xargs. The answer is: you don't use xargs, because you don't need it.
The comment by user80168 describes a way to do this directly with cp, without calling cp for every file:
find . -name '*FooBar*' -exec cp -t /tmp -- {} +
This works because:
the cp -t flag allows to give the target directory near the beginning of cp, rather than near the end. From man cp:
-t, --target-directory=DIRECTORY
copy all SOURCE arguments into DIRECTORY
The -- flag tells cp to interpret everything after as a filename, not a flag, so files starting with - or -- do not confuse cp; you still need this because the -/-- characters are interpreted by cp, whereas any other special characters are interpreted by the shell.
The find -exec command {} + variant essentially does the same as xargs. From man find:
-exec command {} +
This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on
the selected files, but the command line is built by appending
each selected file name at the end; the total number of invoca‐
matched files. The command line is built in much the same way
that xargs builds its command lines. Only one instance of `{}'
is allowed within the command, and (when find is being invoked
from a shell) it should be quoted (for example, '{}') to protect
it from interpretation by shells. The command is executed in
the starting directory. If any invocation returns a non-zero
value as exit status, then find returns a non-zero exit status.
If find encounters an error, this can sometimes cause an immedi‐
ate exit, so some pending commands may not be run at all. This
variant of -exec always returns true.
By using this in find directly, this avoids the need of a pipe or a shell invocation, such that you don't need to worry about any nasty characters in filenames.
With Bash (not POSIX) you can use process substitution to get the current line inside a variable. This enables you to use quotes to escape special characters:
while read line ; do cp "$line" ~/bar ; done < <(find . | grep foo)
Be aware that most of the options discussed in other answers are not standard on platforms that do not use the GNU utilities (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, for instance). See the POSIX specification for 'standard' xargs behaviour.
I also find the behaviour of xargs whereby it runs the command at least once, even with no input, to be a nuisance.
I wrote my own private version of xargs (xargl) to deal with the problems of spaces in names (only newlines separate - though the 'find ... -print0' and 'xargs -0' combination is pretty neat given that file names cannot contain ASCII NUL '\0' characters. My xargl isn't as complete as it would need to be to be worth publishing - especially since GNU has facilities that are at least as good.
For me, I was trying to do something a little different. I wanted to copy my .txt files into my tmp folder. The .txt filenames contain spaces and apostrophe characters. This worked on my Mac.
$ find . -type f -name '*.txt' | sed 's/'"'"'/\'"'"'/g' | sed 's/.*/"&"/' | xargs -I{} cp -v {} ./tmp/
If find and xarg versions on your system doesn't support -print0 and -0 switches (for example AIX find and xargs) you can use this terribly looking code:
find . -name "*foo*" | sed -e "s/'/\\\'/g" -e 's/"/\\"/g' -e 's/ /\\ /g' | xargs cp /your/dest
Here sed will take care of escaping the spaces and quotes for xargs.
Tested on AIX 5.3
I created a small portable wrapper script called "xargsL" around "xargs" which addresses most of the problems.
Contrary to xargs, xargsL accepts one pathname per line. The pathnames may contain any character except (obviously) newline or NUL bytes.
No quoting is allowed or supported in the file list - your file names may contain all sorts of whitespace, backslashes, backticks, shell wildcard characters and the like - xargsL will process them as literal characters, no harm done.
As an added bonus feature, xargsL will not run the command once if there is no input!
Note the difference:
$ true | xargs echo no data
no data
$ true | xargsL echo no data # No output
Any arguments given to xargsL will be passed through to xargs.
Here is the "xargsL" POSIX shell script:
#! /bin/sh
# Line-based version of "xargs" (one pathname per line which may contain any
# amount of whitespace except for newlines) with the added bonus feature that
# it will not execute the command if the input file is empty.
#
# Version 2018.76.3
#
# Copyright (c) 2018 Guenther Brunthaler. All rights reserved.
#
# This script is free software.
# Distribution is permitted under the terms of the GPLv3.
set -e
trap 'test $? = 0 || echo "$0 failed!" >& 2' 0
if IFS= read -r first
then
{
printf '%s\n' "$first"
cat
} | sed 's/./\\&/g' | xargs ${1+"$#"}
fi
Put the script into some directory in your $PATH and don't forget to
$ chmod +x xargsL
the script there to make it executable.
bill_starr's Perl version won't work well for embedded newlines (only copes with spaces). For those on e.g. Solaris where you don't have the GNU tools, a more complete version might be (using sed)...
find -type f | sed 's/./\\&/g' | xargs grep string_to_find
adjust the find and grep arguments or other commands as you require, but the sed will fix your embedded newlines/spaces/tabs.
I used Bill Star's answer slightly modified on Solaris:
find . -mtime +2 | perl -pe 's{^}{\"};s{$}{\"}' > ~/output.file
This will put quotes around each line. I didn't use the '-l' option although it probably would help.
The file list I was going though might have '-', but not newlines. I haven't used the output file with any other commands as I want to review what was found before I just start massively deleting them via xargs.
I played with this a little, started contemplating modifying xargs, and realised that for the kind of use case we're talking about here, a simple reimplementation in Python is a better idea.
For one thing, having ~80 lines of code for the whole thing means it is easy to figure out what is going on, and if different behaviour is required, you can just hack it into a new script in less time than it takes to get a reply on somewhere like Stack Overflow.
See https://github.com/johnallsup/jda-misc-scripts/blob/master/yargs and https://github.com/johnallsup/jda-misc-scripts/blob/master/zargs.py.
With yargs as written (and Python 3 installed) you can type:
find .|grep "FooBar"|yargs -l 203 cp --after ~/foo/bar
to do the copying 203 files at a time. (Here 203 is just a placeholder, of course, and using a strange number like 203 makes it clear that this number has no other significance.)
If you really want something faster and without the need for Python, take zargs and yargs as prototypes and rewrite in C++ or C.
You might need to grep Foobar directory like:
find . -name "file.ext"| grep "FooBar" | xargs -i cp -p "{}" .
If you are using Bash, you can convert stdout to an array of lines by mapfile:
find . | grep "FooBar" | (mapfile -t; cp "${MAPFILE[#]}" ~/foobar)
The benefits are:
It's built-in, so it's faster.
Execute the command with all file names in one time, so it's faster.
You can append other arguments to the file names. For cp, you can also:
find . -name '*FooBar*' -exec cp -t ~/foobar -- {} +
however, some commands don't have such feature.
The disadvantages:
Maybe not scale well if there are too many file names. (The limit? I don't know, but I had tested with 10 MB list file which includes 10000+ file names with no problem, under Debian)
Well... who knows if Bash is available on OS X?