Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I would like to look for files in certain sub-directories in order to avoid looking into possibly big ones.
The subdirectories to search are created monthly following the convention YYYYMM.

I've tried this:

Code:

find . \( ! -name 2[0-9][0-9][0-9][0,1][0-9] -prune \) -o -type f -print

expecting to retrieve only Y and Z out of the 3 examples below

Code:

./a/X01012/X
./a/201012/Y
./a/b/201011/Z

but that command doesn't return anything.

How should i write it ?

Thanks for your help

Moderator's Comments:

Please use code tags when posting data and code samples!

I m not clear what you want
however if you search only named within `2[0-9][0-9][0-9][0,1][0-9]` direcs..
maybe you can use this like

Code:

for i in `find -name "2[0-9][0-9][0-9][0,1][0-9]" -type d`; do find $i -type f ; done

This works indeed (with a '.' after the first find though).

May be i'm being picky but isn't just 1 single call to find necessary ?

Edit: Removed previously posted code.

You don't see any output from your original command because you're pruning the starting (.) directory.

You can exclude every directory not named 2[0-9][0-9][0-9][0,1][0-9] only for a known number of levels,
because otherwise you will also exclude the parent of the directories you're interested in.

---------- Post updated at 12:34 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:13 PM ----------

You can use something like this, but it will fail if there are white spaces or other special characters in the directory names
or if the list returned exceeds the ARG_MAX limit of your OS.

Code:

find $(find . -name '2[0-9][0-9][0-9][01][0-9]' -type d) -type f

Thanks Radoulov, your explanation makes sense. Would some output be expected with the following set then ?

./201012/a/X01012/X
./201012/a/201012/Y
./201011/a/b/201011/Z

I don't understand what you mean, could you please elaborate further?

I mean you're probably right about the reason for the absence of output so i just figured a starting directory matching the regular expression should not be pruned and therefore the command should return something. I've tried it and it's not the case.

Never mind, i'll use 2 find commands as suggested by ygemici or in your last post. Thank you both for your help