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Finding longest common substring among filenames

 
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Old 12-12-2008
Finding longest common substring among filenames
I will be performing a task on several directories, each containing a large number of files (2500+) that follow a regular naming convention:

YYYY_MM_DD_XX.foo_bar.A.B.some_different_stuff.EXT

What I would like to do is automatically discover the part of the filenames that are common to all 2500 files, so that a script could use that as a base name. In practice, this will end up being "YYYY_MM_DD_XX.foo_bar."

I figured out as far as I'll have to use ls to get all the filenames, but there's no command that I know of that will find the largest substring that exists among a large number of strings. I thought perhaps there would be some sed guru out there that would find this problem trivial. You sed experts always blow my mind.
 
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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

aid

AID(1)								   User Commands							    AID(1)

NAME

       aid - Query ID database and report results.

SYNOPSIS

       aid [OPTION]... PATTERN...

DESCRIPTION

       Query  ID database and report results.  By default, output consists of multiple lines, each line containing the matched identifier followed
       by the list of file names in which it occurs.

       -f, --file=FILE
	      file name of ID database

       -i, --ignore-case
	      match PATTERN case insensitively

       -l, --literal
	      match PATTERN as a literal string

       -r, --regexp
	      match PATTERN as a regular expression

       -w, --word
	      match PATTERN as a delimited word

       -s, --substring
	      match PATTERN as a substring

	      Note: If PATTERN contains extended regular expression metacharacters, it is interpreted as a regular expression  substring.   Other-
	      wise, PATTERN is interpreted as a literal word.

       -k, --key=STYLE
	      STYLE is one of `token', `pattern' or `none'

       -R, --result=STYLE
	      STYLE is one of `filenames', `grep', `edit' or `none'

       -S, --separator=STYLE
	      STYLE is one of `braces', `space' or `newline' and only applies to file names when `--result=filenames'

	      The above STYLE options control how query results are presented.	Defaults are --key=token --result=filenames --separator=space

       -F, --frequency=FREQ
	      find tokens that occur FREQ times, where FREQ is a range expressed as `N..M'.  If N is omitted, it defaults to 1, if M is omitted it
	      defaults to MAX_USHRT

       -a, --ambiguous=LEN
	      find tokens whose names are ambiguous for LEN chars

       -x, --hex
	      only find numbers expressed as hexadecimal

       -d, --decimal
	      only find numbers expressed as decimal

       -o, --octal
	      only find numbers expressed as octal

	      By default, searches match numbers of any radix.

       --help display this help and exit

       --version
	      output version information and exit

REPORTING BUGS

       Report bugs to bug-idutils@gnu.org

SEE ALSO

       The full documentation for aid is maintained as a Texinfo manual.  If the info and aid programs are properly installed at  your	site,  the
       command

	      info aid

       should give you access to the complete manual.

aid - 4.5							    August 2010 							    AID(1)