Question

In a bash script I would like to parse the names of all subdirectories and find all subdirectories that have a matching string, but I do not want subdirectories of a match. I am interested in automating construction of my $PATH and $PYTHONPATH variables based on directory structure.

Here’s an example:
Let’s say I want to go through my ~/dev and ~/bin folders and find all subdirectories with bin/ which holds programs that I will want to run at the shell. I can get a list with

$ ls -lR $HOME/bin $HOME/dev |grep "\/"  | grep "bin:"
/Users/dat5h/bin:
/Users/dat5h/bin/project/bin:
...

These can all be appended to $PATH and have all available scripts ready to run.

BUT, let’s say I was searching for directories with python modules and packages to add to $PYTHONPATH. I could conceivably look for all directories that start with /py-. So, I try:

$ ls -lR $HOME/bin $HOME/dev |grep "\/"  | grep "/py-" 
/Users/dat5h/bin/py-test:
/Users/dat5h/bin/py-test/test-package:
/Users/dat5h/bin/py-test/test-package/nested-test:
...

My thinking is that I would not want to put package directories and subdirectories into the path. I’m pretty sure that would be strange, but I am actually new to python so suggestions would be helpful. How would I go about constructing a test case to only get directories with py-* but non of the subsequent subdirectories?

I tried:

$ ls -lR $HOME/bin $HOME/dev |grep "\/"  | egrep "/py-.*[^/]:"

But this doesn’t get the job done either. Maybe a better regex? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

---

SOLUTION

The solution I ended up satisfied with was the find suggested below with a cutoms regex:

find $HOME/bin $HOME/dev -type d -regex ".*\/py\(\w\|-\w\)*"

This will find all subdirectories of ~/bin and ~/dev that are some variant of “pySOMETHING”, “py-SOMETHING”, “pySOME_THING_ELSE”, or “py-SOME_THING_ELSE” but does not grab any subdirectories of those unless they also match this string. This ensures that I can have some simple naming convention for all of my directories with python modules/packages and import them this way without accidentally being able to import nested packages without the hierarchy.

Answer 1

Does this:

find -type d  -regex ".*py.*bin.*" 

give you some start?