UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hiya,

I want to list all files missing a certain pattern and/or filename pattern on the entire drive.

In DOS I would type (for instance):

dir \t*.doc /s /a

which should find all doc files whose filename starts with `t'.

How do I do that in a unix shell? Can it be done w/ ls at all? I don't seem to succeed, I've read the man pages, but either I don't understand them correctly or it's not doing what it's supposed to do. For instance: I've tried: ls -AFR com.* from root dir, and it doesn't find stuff in subfolders.
(Ok, you got me, I'm a unix newbie.)

uses:
Mac OS X
tcsh

I'm looking for a solution that would work with most shells, sh, csh, tcsh, bash, you name it.


Also, the man pages frequently mention I can press tab or esc x 2 for choice/filename/dirname completion, but that doesn't seem to work on my (default Mac OS X terminal) tcsh either?

cheers,

the rop

find / -name "search string here" -print

Hm, alroight. Cool. But what's the story w/ ls -R? I don't really get it why it doesn't seem to recurse subdirs as that is what it says it does?

I don't know why your "ls -R" doesn't work unless you are
doing...

ls -R t*

...which if no files in the current directory are found that
match, you'll get...

ls: t*: No such file or directory

...you can do this...

ls -R | grep "^t"

...which will list every file that begins with the letter "t"
but the "find" command is much better suited for this
as Optimus_P pointed out.

Greetings all,

I couldn't figure out a way to find a filename that matches 2 wildcards using one command, so this works but there must be a better way. Hopefully someone will post it.

Anyway you could use:
find / -name t* -print > /anyfile

Pipes all files that begin with t
into a file and then use grep to search the file named /anything.

grep .doc$ /anything

Hope this helps until something better is posted.

Checked the man pages and found some good stuff. Much better.

find / -name t* -name *.doc -print

Don't actually need to specify the
-print option. Assuming it is the default.At least on my set up.