Question

I have folders named:

example1 example2 example3

And I want to extract the example number from each of them. Something like:

for exampleSubfolder in `find . -type d`
do
  example_number= #replace 'example' in $exampleSubfolder with empty string
  #do other stuff in this subfolder
done

Any simple way to do this?

Answer 1

If you only need the number:

find . -type d -name 'example*' | egrep -o "[0-9]+"

But if you want to know the correspondance between folder name and number:

for f in $(find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -name 'example*')
do
   number=${f#example}
done

Updated with the string replace bashism.