UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

I am fairly new to Unix, I've been running Ubuntu 10.10 on my laptop for a couple days now. I have followed a tutorial on using the terminal, and I can get around but there are some things I haven't figured out how to do yet.

For example, I have a directory which contains all my movies, series etc. I want to search through it, and find all files that are either .mkv, .wmv or .avi files, but that don't end in -sample.*whichever*.

I have got this so far
ls -lhR | grep sample.* -vi | grep .mkv

It shows all .mkv files that don't end in sample or Sample.

What I can't figure out yet:

Thanks in advance!

It's much more straight-forward if you use find instead, eg

Code:

find . -type f \( -name '*.mkv' -o -name '*.avi' -o -name '*.wmv' \) \! -name '*-sample*'

Read as: find in the current directory all files with a name of *.mkv or *.avi or *.wmv and not with *-sample* in the name.

Makes sense using find, but it doesn't work. Just shows a > on a new line on which I can type, and doesn´t do anything and i have to press ^D.

I can't really figure out the code you gave.

find . => find in current directory
-type f => a regular file
\( => can't really figure this out, I suppose escaping the parentheses so they are not treated as a keyword?
-name '*.mkv' => pretty straightforward
-o => or according to the Man Page
\! => I suppose it means not?

If you get an right angle bracket on the prompt there's usually one to many or not enough quotes. I've made one too much in my example, corrected now. The parentheses are used for grouping, since the default operation is "and", and we want the filenames to be or'd. Escaping is needed for them and the exclamation mark, since they hold special meaning for some shells (bash included). Otherwise your explanation of the command is correct.