Question

I am building a find command programatically:

find  "${SRC_DIR}" "${FILE_NAMES}" -type f -mtime +14 -level 0

Where FILE_NAMES is the file patterns that I need to match, which is a simple whitespace delimited list of patterns (*.txt, *.html, etc).

To format this list correctly for the find command, it can’t just be a list though, it has to look like:

-name *.txt -o -name *.html

My solution was to use:

FILE_NAMES=$(echo ${FILES} | sed -e 's/\s+/-o -name /g')

But it’s not working, specifically it doesn’t seem to understand that I want to replace whitespace. Does anyone have a better way to do this?

Answer 1

Not all seds support perl-like place holders for space, digits, etc. I don’t have a way to test your exact case, but the following should be a good guide.

Also, note that find -predicate -predicate .... are ANDed by default. to make the -o work, you have to surrond the whole thing in ( (parens) ) AND so the shell won’t see the paren as a request to launch a subshell, you have to escape the parens, i.e \( .... -o .... \). So that leads us to

 set -vx; SRC_DIR="." ; FILE_NAMES="a b c"
 find  "${SRC_DIR}" \( $(echo "$FILE_NAMES"| sed 's/ / -o -name /g;s/^/-name /') \) -type f -mtime +14 -level 0

OUTPUT

+ echo 'a b c'
+ sed 's/ / -o -name /g;s/^/-name /'
+ find . '\( -name a -o -name b  -o -name c \)' -type f -mtime +14 -level 0
find: invalid predicate `-level'

which just indicates that my find doesn’t support -level either.

edit removed extra " chars surounding the \(....\).

also

If you’re using a ksh93, it maybe possible to use variable modifiers, like

${FILE_NAME// / -o -name}

But you’ll need to either just concatenate the opening -name or do a 2nd substitution on the saved value of FILE_NAME.

You can see if you have ksh93 by issuing the following cmd

echo ${.sh.version}

If you get a value, then you have ksh93.

IHTH