UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

how to find for a file whose name has all characters in uppercase after 'project'?

I tried this:

find . -name 'project[A-Z]*[^a-z]*.pdf'
./projectABC.pdf
./projectABC123.pdf


I want only ./projectABC.pdf

What is the regular expression that correponds to "all characters are capital"?
thanks

find doesn't actually support full regular expressions, and therein lies your real problem. But pipe it to something which does, and it should be easy.

Code:

find . -name 'project[A-Z]*.pdf' | grep '/project[A-Z]*\.pdf$'

The wildcard in the find command line matches [A-Z] followed by anything. You can't easily say "anything except" in wildcards. However, you can pipe the matches to grep, which does support full regular expressions; the regular expression means something slightly different: it says [A-Z] zero or more times. So the asterisk has a different meaning there, and allows you to express the constraint that you have.

Code:

$ find ./ ! -name 'project*[0-9]*.pdf' -name 'project[A-Z]*.pdf'
./projectABC.pdf

if you have GNU find, you can use -regex option.

hello,

thanks for the answers but:

find ./ ! -name 'project*[0-9]*.pdf' -name 'project[A-Z]*.pdf'
./projectAbc.pdf
./projectABC.pdf
./projectABC#.pdf



find . -name 'project[A-Z]*.pdf' | grep '/project[A-Z]*\.pdf$'
./projectAbc.pdf
./projectABC.pdf


I want only to display projetABC.pdf

thanks in advance

Are you sure about the second one? You're not passing in "grep -i" or have something in your environment to that effect?

For some reason, this is working on Solaris but not on Linux:

Solaris:
bash-3.00# find . -name 'project[A-Z]*.pdf' | grep '/project[A-Z]*\.pdf$'
./projectABC.pdf
./projectABA.pdf

Linux:
find . -name 'project[A-Z]*.pdf' | grep '/project[A-Z]*\.pdf$'
./projectAbc.pdf
./projectABC.pdf
./projectABA.pdf