Question

I have one scenario where I need to select all files having aliencoders.numeric-digits
like alienoders.1206
and find command should search all subdirectories too. If there is no such file it should not do anything.

I wrote :

find /home/jassi/ -name "aliencoders.[0-9]+" | xargs ls -lrt | awk print '$9'

Bit it says no such file or directory if there no such file starts with aliencoders.xx…

How I can by pass this error. I have to run it for several such directories and it should give output for those directories only in which such file pattern exists else no warning and doesn’t do xargs etc stuffs.

Currently, if no such file is there then it is taking current directory t find instead of /home/jassi

Answer 1

If you don’t want xargs to execute if the input is empty you can use -r or --no-run-if-empty which are GNU extensions as pointed out in the man page. So if you have that support, you can try
find /home/jassi/ -name "aliencoders.[0-9]+" | xargs -r ls -lrt | awk '{print $9}'
Alternatively you can make use of exec option with find to achieve this something on these lines
find /home/jassi/ -name "aliencoders.[0-9]+" -exec ls -lrt {} + | awk '{print $9}'
Hope this helps!