Using find to locate files that match one of multiple patterns

user_120999 0
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I was trying to get a list of all python and html files in a directory with the command find Documents -name "*.{py,html}".

Then along came the man page:

Braces within the pattern (‘{}’) are not considered to be special (that is, find . -name 'foo{1,2}' matches a file named foo{1,2}, not the files foo1 and foo2.

As this is part of a pipe-chain, I'd like to be able to specify which extensions it matches at runtime (no hardcoding). If find just can't do it, a perl one-liner (or similar) would be fine.

Edit: The answer I eventually came up with include all sorts of crap, and is a bit long as well, so I posted it as an answer to the original itch I was trying to scratch. Feel free to hack that up if you have better solutions.

find shell
12 Answers

Use -o, which means "or":

find Documents \( -name "*.py" -o -name "*.html" \)

You'd need to build that command line programmatically, which isn't that easy.

Are you using bash (or Cygwin on Windows)? If you are, you should be able to do this:

ls **/*.py **/*.html

which might be easier to build programmatically.

user_218860

You could programmatically add more -name clauses, separated by -or:

find Documents \( -name "*.py" -or -name "*.html" \)

Or, go for a simple loop instead:

for F in Documents/*.{py,html}; do ...something with each '$F'... ; done
user_749390

I had a similar need. This worked for me:

find ../../ \( -iname 'tmp' -o -iname 'vendor' \) -prune -o \( -iname '*.*rb' -o -iname '*.rjs' \) -print
user_2602790

Braces within the pattern \(\) is required for name pattern with or

find Documents -type f \( -name "*.py" -or -name "*.html" \)

While for the name pattern with and operator it is not required

find Documents -type f ! -name "*.py" -and ! -name "*.html"
user_40584840

What about

ls {*.py,*.html}

It lists out all the files ending with .py or .html in their filenames

user_30207400
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