[Gllug] Match optional character in filename expansion with find

[Stuart Sears]

On 16/02/12 15:10, John Edwards wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 02:57:21PM +0000, gvim wrote:
>> In the `find' command how do I match an optional end character, eg.
>> match all files ending in 'html' or 'htm'?
>> 
>> find . -name '*.ht{m,ml}' -print
>> 
>> ... doesn't work. Perl regexes have ? so what's the equivalent
>> using `find'.
> 
> GNU find has a '-regex' option, but the man page says it only 
> supports Emacs regular expressions and not Perl compatible ones.
> 
You can specify the regex type you'd like to use - there are a number of
choices (at least on my version of findutils)

man find:
-regextype type
       Changes the regular expression syntax understood by -regex  and
       -iregex tests which occur later on the command line.  Currently-
       implemented types are emacs (this is  the  default),  posix-awk,
       posix-basic, posix-egrep and posix-extended.


so something like this:

find . -type f -regextype posix-extended -iregex '.*\.html?'

but in this case even the standard 'emacs' regex class works the way you
want

find . -type f -regex '.*\.html?'

should probably do what you're after

n.b. these examples all from
find (GNU findutils) 4.5.10

Stuart
-- 
Stuart Sears RHCA etc.
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