Shell command to find files in a directory pattern - linux

With a shell command i need to list all files on my server in the following directory pattern:
/home/*/public_html/images/*.php
Theres a few an its taking a long time to do this manually. I really have no idea when it comes to these commands.

find /path/to/directory/. -path "*/match/this/path/*" -type f -name "*.php"

Shell Script:
find /home/*/public_html/images -iname "*php" -exec echo {} \;
You can then change the -exec command to do whatever actions you want to the returned files. In this case, we echo them, but you could easily perform other actions as well.

Let bash expand the files for you and use ls to list them:
ls /home/*/public_html/images/*.php
Example output:
/home/grant/public_html/images/bar.php
/home/grant/public_html/images/foo.php
/home/marcog/public_html/images/helloworld.php

Use the PHP glob function
glob('/home/*/public_html/images/*.php')
It will return an array of the matching path strings. You can also just use:
ls /home/*/public_html/images/*.php
or:
for i in /tmp/*/public_html/images/*.php;
do
some_command "$i"
done
from the shell.

Related

Loop through a directory with any level of depth

I want to execute a command on all files present on all levels in the directory. It may have any number of files and sub directories. Even these sub directories may contain any number of files and subdirectories. I want to do this using shell script. As I am new to this field can any one suggest me a way out.
You can use the command "find" with "xargs" after "|"(pipe).
Example: Suppose that I want to remove all files that have ".txt" extension on "Documents" directory:
find Documents -iname *.txt |xargs rm -f
Helps?
You can use a recursive command that uses wildcard characters (*) like so:
for dir in ~/dev/myproject/*; do (cd "$dir" && git status); done
If you want to apply commands on the individual files you should use the find command and execute commands on it like so:
find yourdirectory -type f -exec echo "File found: '{}'" \;
What this does:
finds all the items in the directory yourdirectory
that have the type f - so are a file
runs an exec on each file
Use find:
find -type f -exec COMMAND {} \;
-f applies the command only to files, not to directories. The command is recursive by default.

Embedding a bash command inside the mv command

I have a directory that contains a list of files having the following format:
240-timestamp1.ts
240-timestamp2.ts
...
360-timestamp1.ts
360-timestamp2.ts
Now, I want to implement a bash command which matches the files that start with '240' and renames them so that instead of '240-timestampX.ts' the files look like '240-human-readable-timestampX.ts'.
I have tried the following:
find . -maxdepth 1 -mmin +5 -type f -name "240*"
-exec mv $0 {$0/240-***and here I want to insert
either stat -c %y filename or date -d #timestampX***} '{}' \;
I stuck here because I don't know if I can embed a bash command inside the mv command. I know the task may look a bit confusing and over-complicated, but I would like to know if it is possible to do so. Of course I can create a bash script that would go through all the files in the directory and while loop them with changing their respective names, but somehow I think that a single command would be more efficient (even if less readable).
The OS is Linux Ubuntu 12.04.5
The shell is bash
Thank you both Kenavoz and Kurt Stutsman for the proposed solutions. Both your answers perform the task; however, I marked Kenavoz's answer as the accepted one because of the degree of similarity between my question and Kenavoz's answer. Even if it is indeed possible to do it in a cleaner way with omitting the find command, it is necessary in my case to use the respective command because I need to find files older than X units of time. So thank you both once again!
In case you want to keep your mmin option, your can use find and process found files with a bash command using xargs :
find . -maxdepth 1 -mmin +5 -type f -name "240*.ts" | xargs -L 1 bash -c 'mv "${1}" "240-$(stat -c %y ${1}).ts"' \;
In bash if all your files are in a single directory, you don't need to use find at all. You can do a for loop:
for file in 240-*; do
hr_timestamp=$(date -d $(echo "$file" | sed 's/.*-\([0-9]*\)\.ts/\1/'))
mv "$file" "240-$hr_timestamp.ts"
done

Find files in a dir, executing a command with execdir and redirecting

It seems like I am unable to find a direct answer to this question.
I appreciate your help.
I'm trying to find all files with a specific name in a directory, read the last 1000 lines of the file and copy it in to a new file in the same directory. As an example:
Find all files names xyz.log in the current directory, copy the last 1000 lines to file abc.log (which doesn't exist).
I tried to use the following command with no luck:
find . -name "xyz.log" -execdir tail -1000 {} > abc.log \;
The problem I'm having is that for all the files in the current directory, they all write to abc.log in the CURRENT directory and not in the directory where xyz.log resides. Clearly the find with execdir is first executed and then the output is redirected to abc.log.
Can you guys suggest a way to fix this? I appreciate any information/help.
EDIT- I tried find . -name "xyz.log" -execdir sh -c "tail -1000 {} > abc.log" \; as suggested by some of the friends, but it gives me this error: sh: ./tail: No such file or directory error message. Do you guys have any idea what the problem is?
Luckily the solution to use -printf is working fine.
The simplest way is this:
find . -name "xyz.log" -execdir sh -c 'tail -1000 "{}" >abc.log' \;
A more flexible alternative is to first print out the commands and then execute them all with sh:
find . -name "xyz.log" -printf 'tail -1000 "%p" >"%h/abc.log"\n' | sh
You can remove the | sh from the end when you're trying it out/debugging.
There is a bug in some versions of findutils (4.2 and 4.3, though it was fixed in some 4.2.x and 4.3.x versions) that cause execdir arguments that contain {} to be prefixed with ./ (instead of the prefix being applied only to {} it is applied to the whole quoted string). To work around this you can use:
find . -name "xyz.log" -execdir sh -c 'tail -1000 "$1" >abc.log' sh {} \;
sh -c 'script' arg0 arg1 runs the sh script with arg0, arg1, etc. passed to it. By convention, arg0 is the name of the executable (here, "sh"). From the script you can access the arguments using $0 (corresponding to "sh"), $1 (corresponding to find's expansion of {}), etc.
The redirect isn't passed into execdir, so abc.log shows up in the directory you run the command in. -execdir also doesn't like embedded redirects. but you can workaround the problem by passing -execdir a shell command with a redirect embedded, like this:
find . -name "xyz.log" -execdir sh -c '/usr/bin/tail -1000 {} > abc.log' \;
Much credit to this blog post (not mine):
http://www.microhowto.info/howto/act_on_all_files_in_a_directory_tree_using_find.html
Edit
I put the full path to tail in the command (assuming it's in /usr/bin on your system), since sh may load a .profile with a PATH that differs from your current shell.
Here's another non-find (well, sorta - it still uses find but doesn't try to shoehorn find into doing the whole thing):
while read f
do
d=$(dirname "${f}")
tail -n 1000 "${f}" > "${d}/abc.log"
done < <(find . -type f -name xyz.log -print)

Find multiple files and rename them in Linux

I am having files like a_dbg.txt, b_dbg.txt ... in a Suse 10 system. I want to write a bash shell script which should rename these files by removing "_dbg" from them.
Google suggested me to use rename command. So I executed the command rename _dbg.txt .txt *dbg* on the CURRENT_FOLDER
My actual CURRENT_FOLDER contains the below files.
CURRENT_FOLDER/a_dbg.txt
CURRENT_FOLDER/b_dbg.txt
CURRENT_FOLDER/XX/c_dbg.txt
CURRENT_FOLDER/YY/d_dbg.txt
After executing the rename command,
CURRENT_FOLDER/a.txt
CURRENT_FOLDER/b.txt
CURRENT_FOLDER/XX/c_dbg.txt
CURRENT_FOLDER/YY/d_dbg.txt
Its not doing recursively, how to make this command to rename files in all subdirectories. Like XX and YY I will be having so many subdirectories which name is unpredictable. And also my CURRENT_FOLDER will be having some other files also.
You can use find to find all matching files recursively:
find . -iname "*dbg*" -exec rename _dbg.txt .txt '{}' \;
EDIT: what the '{}' and \; are?
The -exec argument makes find execute rename for every matching file found. '{}' will be replaced with the path name of the file. The last token, \; is there only to mark the end of the exec expression.
All that is described nicely in the man page for find:
-exec utility [argument ...] ;
True if the program named utility returns a zero value as its
exit status. Optional arguments may be passed to the utility.
The expression must be terminated by a semicolon (``;''). If you
invoke find from a shell you may need to quote the semicolon if
the shell would otherwise treat it as a control operator. If the
string ``{}'' appears anywhere in the utility name or the argu-
ments it is replaced by the pathname of the current file.
Utility will be executed from the directory from which find was
executed. Utility and arguments are not subject to the further
expansion of shell patterns and constructs.
For renaming recursively I use the following commands:
find -iname \*.* | rename -v "s/ /-/g"
small script i wrote to replace all files with .txt extension to .cpp extension under /tmp and sub directories recursively
#!/bin/bash
for file in $(find /tmp -name '*.txt')
do
mv $file $(echo "$file" | sed -r 's|.txt|.cpp|g')
done
with bash:
shopt -s globstar nullglob
rename _dbg.txt .txt **/*dbg*
find -execdir rename also works for non-suffix replacements on basenames
https://stackoverflow.com/a/16541670/895245 works directly only for suffixes, but this will work for arbitrary regex replacements on basenames:
PATH=/usr/bin find . -depth -execdir rename 's/_dbg.txt$/_.txt' '{}' \;
or to affect files only:
PATH=/usr/bin find . -type f -execdir rename 's/_dbg.txt$/_.txt' '{}' \;
-execdir first cds into the directory before executing only on the basename.
Tested on Ubuntu 20.04, find 4.7.0, rename 1.10.
Convenient and safer helper for it
find-rename-regex() (
set -eu
find_and_replace="$1"
PATH="$(echo "$PATH" | sed -E 's/(^|:)[^\/][^:]*//g')" \
find . -depth -execdir rename "${2:--n}" "s/${find_and_replace}" '{}' \;
)
GitHub upstream.
Sample usage to replace spaces ' ' with hyphens '-'.
Dry run that shows what would be renamed to what without actually doing it:
find-rename-regex ' /-/g'
Do the replace:
find-rename-regex ' /-/g' -v
Command explanation
The awesome -execdir option does a cd into the directory before executing the rename command, unlike -exec.
-depth ensure that the renaming happens first on children, and then on parents, to prevent potential problems with missing parent directories.
-execdir is required because rename does not play well with non-basename input paths, e.g. the following fails:
rename 's/findme/replaceme/g' acc/acc
The PATH hacking is required because -execdir has one very annoying drawback: find is extremely opinionated and refuses to do anything with -execdir if you have any relative paths in your PATH environment variable, e.g. ./node_modules/.bin, failing with:
find: The relative path ‘./node_modules/.bin’ is included in the PATH environment variable, which is insecure in combination with the -execdir action of find. Please remove that entry from $PATH
See also: https://askubuntu.com/questions/621132/why-using-the-execdir-action-is-insecure-for-directory-which-is-in-the-path/1109378#1109378
-execdir is a GNU find extension to POSIX. rename is Perl based and comes from the rename package.
Rename lookahead workaround
If your input paths don't come from find, or if you've had enough of the relative path annoyance, we can use some Perl lookahead to safely rename directories as in:
git ls-files | sort -r | xargs rename 's/findme(?!.*\/)\/?$/replaceme/g' '{}'
I haven't found a convenient analogue for -execdir with xargs: https://superuser.com/questions/893890/xargs-change-working-directory-to-file-path-before-executing/915686
The sort -r is required to ensure that files come after their respective directories, since longer paths come after shorter ones with the same prefix.
Tested in Ubuntu 18.10.
Script above can be written in one line:
find /tmp -name "*.txt" -exec bash -c 'mv $0 $(echo "$0" | sed -r \"s|.txt|.cpp|g\")' '{}' \;
If you just want to rename and don't mind using an external tool, then you can use rnm. The command would be:
#on current folder
rnm -dp -1 -fo -ssf '_dbg' -rs '/_dbg//' *
-dp -1 will make it recursive to all subdirectories.
-fo implies file only mode.
-ssf '_dbg' searches for files with _dbg in the filename.
-rs '/_dbg//' replaces _dbg with empty string.
You can run the above command with the path of the CURRENT_FOLDER too:
rnm -dp -1 -fo -ssf '_dbg' -rs '/_dbg//' /path/to/the/directory
You can use this below.
rename --no-act 's/\.html$/\.php/' *.html */*.html
This command worked for me. Remember first to install the perl rename package:
find -iname \*.* | grep oldname | rename -v "s/oldname/newname/g
To expand on the excellent answer #CiroSantilliПутлерКапут六四事 : do not match files in the find that we don't have to rename.
I have found this to improve performance significantly on Cygwin.
Please feel free to correct my ineffective bash coding.
FIND_STRING="ZZZZ"
REPLACE_STRING="YYYY"
FIND_PARAMS="-type d"
find-rename-regex() (
set -eu
find_and_replace="${1}/${2}/g"
echo "${find_and_replace}"
find_params="${3}"
mode="${4}"
if [ "${mode}" = 'real' ]; then
PATH="$(echo "$PATH" | sed -E 's/(^|:)[^\/][^:]*//g')" \
find . -depth -name "*${1}*" ${find_params} -execdir rename -v "s/${find_and_replace}" '{}' \;
elif [ "${mode}" = 'dryrun' ]; then
echo "${mode}"
PATH="$(echo "$PATH" | sed -E 's/(^|:)[^\/][^:]*//g')" \
find . -depth -name "*${1}*" ${find_params} -execdir rename -n "s/${find_and_replace}" '{}' \;
fi
)
find-rename-regex "${FIND_STRING}" "${REPLACE_STRING}" "${FIND_PARAMS}" "dryrun"
# find-rename-regex "${FIND_STRING}" "${REPLACE_STRING}" "${FIND_PARAMS}" "real"
In case anyone is comfortable with fd and rnr, the command is:
fd -t f -x rnr '_dbg.txt' '.txt'
rnr only command is:
rnr -f -r '_dbg.txt' '.txt' *
rnr has the benefit of being able to undo the command.
On Ubuntu (after installing rename), this simpler solution worked the best for me. This replaces space with underscore, but can be modified as needed.
find . -depth | rename -d -v -n "s/ /_/g"
The -depth flag is telling find to traverse the depth of a directory first, which is good because I want to rename the leaf nodes first.
The -d flag on rename tells it to only rename the filename component of the path. I don't know how general the behavior is but on my installation (Ubuntu 20.04), it could be the file or the directory as long as it is the leaf node of the path.
I recommend the -n (no action) flag first along with -v, so you can see what would get renamed and how.
Using the two flags together, it renames all the files in a directory first and then the directory itself. Working backwards. Which is exactly what I needed.
classic solution:
for f in $(find . -name "*dbg*"); do mv $f $(echo $f | sed 's/_dbg//'); done

Running command recursively in linux

I'm trying to come up with a command that would run mp3gain FOLDER/SUBFOLDER/*.mp3 in each subfolder, but I'm having trouble understanding why this command doesn't work:
find . -type d -exec mp3gain \"{}\"/*.mp3 \;
When run, I get error Can't open "./FOLDER/SUBFOLDER"/*.mp3 for reading for each folder and subfolder.
If I run command manually with mp3gain "./FOLDER/SUBFOLDER"/*.mp3 it works. What's going wrong?
If you have a fixed data structure like
folder1/subfolder1/
folder1/subfolder2/
folder2/subfolder1/
[...]
and using zsh or bash version >=4.0 you could try
mp3gain **/*.mp3
But to make sure check the output of
ls **/*.mp3
before you are getting serious with mp3gain.
When you run mp3gain "./FOLDER/SUBFOLDER"/*.mp3 from your shell, the *.mp3 is getting expanded by the shell before being passed to mp3gain. When find runs it, there is no shell involved, and the *.mp3 is getting passed literally to mp3gain. The latter has no idea how to deal with wildcards (because normally it doesn't have to).
Hmmm. Just tried this to test how the directory is parsed by replacing mp3gain with echo and it works:
find . -type d -exec echo {}\/\*.mp3 \;
Try running your version of the command but with echo to see the file output for yourself:
find . -type d -exec echo \"{}\"/*.mp3 \;
Seems the quotes get in the way in your original command.
this works...
find /music -name *mp3 -exec mp3gain -r -k {} \;

Resources