UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

i was just wondering if any one had a good example of finding mutliple file types with the -o option or any other alternatives.

find . \( -name "*.txt" -o -name "*.tag" \)

for some reason i'm not having much luck and the man page isn't very descriptive.

what i am trying to do is find all files recursively with the extension of txt OR tag.

Thanks in anticipation.

try this
find . -name "*"t[xa][tg]

this will also give you files ending on tat and txg,
but if you send your request afterwads trough an egrep like this find . -name "*"t[xa][tg] | egrep -v '(.tat|.txg)' you should get a good result

but nup, it doesn't seem to work

i tried this:

find . -name "*"[pl][pm]

(but it doesn't seem to pick up the *.pl files) and i tried variations of this also....


and I would grep it however (i should have mentioned it before) I wish to add some extra parameters on the find command line. ie find . \( -name "*.txt" -o -name "*.tag" \) -exec grep -il "text" {} \;


additionally:

does the pipe character substitute an OR command only for a single character? ie find . -name "*.p[l|m]"

this works, however I am looking for 3 digit and different file extensions.

you don't need the pipe when you use square brackets
it works like this

"*"t[ax][gt] means everything ending on "t" "a or x" "g or t" this is tag,tat,txt,txg

when you write "*"[pl][pm] , you search for everything ending on
pp, pm, lp, lm and not "pl"

so everything between the brackets represents 1 position

P.S. you can add as many characters as you whish between a set of brackets
so [aze][aze] stands for aa,az,ae,za,zz,ze,ea,ez,ee

I just tried:
find . \( -name "*.c" -o -name "*.txt" \)
and I cannot get it to fail.

Could you be using ann older version of "find" that still requires a -print option?

hmmm, the find might be an older version then, because it does work when I use the print command. Any way of finding what version it is?

thank you all for the help!!!