Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Fun finding things

I found a neat way to use find today. If you want to do an inverse search (think grep -v, but in find), simply use '!'. For Example:


find . '!' -name '*.zip'


Find all files that don't end in .zip.
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3 comments:

  1. AnonymousThursday, April 28, 2011 12:14:00 AM

    Combining it with other parameters can make it even stronger:

    find . -type f -iname '*debian*' ! -iname '*.png'
    Finds all files with the text debian anywhere in the name and where the name does not end in .png.
    Also matches DeBiAn and .PNG which is sometimes nice.

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  2. AnonymousThursday, April 28, 2011 7:26:00 AM

    I find -not easier to read and use. Like

    $ find . -type f -not -name "*.mp3"

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  3. UnknownFriday, April 29, 2011 4:57:00 PM

    It's funny you should mention that! I used find in a way I hadn't before today as well!

    find -executable -delete

    @anti-dotu: Apparently -not is non-POSIX-compliant, which '!' is.

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