Question

I have a script where I want to find all direct subdirectories that is purely numerical in a folder and copy them to a specified destination. I have issues to get regexp to work with + and * in find. The folder structure in the example is as follows:

0/
1/
2/
3/
3.02asd/
3a/
4/
44/
45/
451/
452/
453/
4531/
4532/
45321/
45322/
45323/
666aa/
66a/
66aaa/
temp27/

I have gotten this to work with the following commands:

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -name "[0-9]" | while read f
do
    mv $f $TESTPATH
done

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -name "[0-9][0-9]" | while read f
do
    mv $f $TESTPATH
done

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -name "[0-9][0-9][0-9]" | while read f
do
    mv $f $TESTPATH
done

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -name "[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]" | while read f
do
    mv $f $TESTPATH
done

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -name "[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]" | while read f
do
    mv $f $TESTPATH
done

Not very nice but it works, but this should probably be possible with something like:

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -name "[0-9]+"

or

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -name "[0-9][0-9]*"

But it seems that + doesn’t work and * is wildcard it seems.

Answer 1

Use -regex instead of -name, e.g.

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -regex ".*/[0-9]*"