UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I want to search for a file pattern in more than one directory. How I need to do that?

Here is the scenario:

I am having a directory structure like the following:
/log
...../20051001
..........ftp_server_20051001.log
..........ftp_down_server.log
..........ftp_up_server.log
...../20051101
..........ftp_server_20051101.log
...../20051201
..........ftp_down_server.log
..........ftp_up_server.log
...../20060101
..........ftp_down_server.log
..........ftp_up_server.log
...../20060201
..........ftp_server_20060201.log
...../20060301
..........ftp_down_server.log
..........ftp_up_server.log
..........ftp_server_20060201.log
...../20060401
..........ftp_down_server.log
..........ftp_up_server.log

I want to find out all the logs that start with "ftp_server" in the
year 2006 from the log directory.
Can some one help me with the command?

I used to try like: $ find . -name 2006*/ftp_server*. It listed only one
file information and quits with some error. I am looking for all the files

Thanks,
Ravi

The -name option specifies the filename, not the path.

If there's a small number of them you can do this with shell globbing:

Code:

ls 2006*/ftp_server*

Otherwise, you might do this with find and grep:

Code:

 find . -iname 'ftp_server*' | grep 2006

I think the command need to be like this:
find . -name 'ftp_server*' | grep 2006

This particular command is having the over head of pulling the
file information from all the folders and then it greps for only 2006.

The overhead here is searching all the files rather I want to narrow
the search to search only in the 2006* folders.

Can we achieve this?

find has options relating to this, but they're all depreciated for security reasons. We can do this, sure, but probably not in one command. Here we have 'find' locating directories beginning with 2006, and bash locating files within them beginning with ftp_server. The 2> /dev/null redirects error messages to /dev/null for directories with no ftp_server* file in them.

Code:

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -name '2006*' |
        while read DIR
        do
                ls ${DIR}/ftp_server*
        done 2> /dev/null

Thanks for all your help. I got an easy command:
$ find 2006*/ -name ftp_server*

If that will work, then so will the ls 2006*/ftp_server* I suggested in the first place. Your solution has the same caveat -- too many directories will exceed the maximum commandline length of your shell.

Yeah thats right.. we can use "ls" also to get the same results. Infact, I think "ls" is the best to use as we have more options in that.

Ex:
$ ls -l 2006*/ftp_server*
$ ls -l 2006*/*NCPAY_MAR*.enc