A few months ago, we finished the third of a series about features added to longstanding utility programs. This month we’ll look at the new features that GNU programmers and others have added to all of the other features that find(1) already had. (You can “find” an introduction to find in here: A Very Valuable Find.
There are lots of versions of find. We’ll cover the GNU version 4.1.20 (the latest, as of this writing, from the Debian stable distribution).
Filename Matching
Older versions of find had one way to check the name of an entry: the -name test. The argument to -name is a case-sensitive filename or shell wildcard pattern.
Shell wildcards are simpler than grep-like regular expressions, but they limit the matching -name can do. For instance, matching a file named with all uppercase characters is tough with shell wildcards (but simple with a regular expression, as we’ll see soon with -regex).
The string or wildcard pattern after -name is compared to the name of the entry currently being scanned, not that entry’s pathname. So, for instance, it’s easy to know whether the current filename ends in .c, but it’s a lot harder to know whether that file is in a directory named src.
The -path test, which was added fairly early to many find versions, is a shell wildcard-type pattern match against the entire current pathname. So, the test -path '*src/*.c' gets close to what we want here: it matches any pathname containing src, followed…
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