I'm having trouble using the regex of the find command. Probably something I don't understand about escaping on the command line.
Why are these not the same?
find -regex '.*[1234567890]' find -regex '.*[[:digit:]]' Bash, Ubuntu
- What output do you have to indicate that they are not?shellter– shellter2011-04-12 13:16:12 +00:00Commented Apr 12, 2011 at 13:16
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4 Answers
You should have a look on the -regextype argument of find, see manpage:
-regextype type Changes the regular expression syntax understood by -regex and -iregex tests which occur later on the command line. Currently-implemented types are emacs (this is the default), posix-awk, posix-basic, posix-egrep and posix-extended. I guess the emacs type doesn't support the [[:digit:]] construct. I tried it with posix-extended and it worked as expected:
find -regextype posix-extended -regex '.*[1234567890]' find -regextype posix-extended -regex '.*[[:digit:]]' 
1 Comment
Dijkstra
I thought it might be that, but I checked the emacs regex definitions and they appear to support [:digit:]. gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/…
Regular expressions with character classes (e.g. [[:digit:]]) are not supported in the default regular expression syntax used by find. You need to specify a different regex type such as posix-extended in order to use them.
Take a look at GNU Find's Regular Expression documentation which shows you all the regex types and what they support.
2 Comments
Dijkstra
Thanks. That document is the one I should have been looking for. All I could find was gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/… - which seemed to suggest that character classes were supported in "emacs regex mode".
asoundmove
Also check Regular_expression#Character_classes - very helpful resource
Note that -regex depends on whole path.
-regex pattern File name matches regular expression pattern. This is a match on the whole path, not a search. You don't actually have to use -regex for what you are doing.
find . -iname "*[0-9]" 
1 Comment
Al.G.
The excplicit dot is unneeded here, too ;)
Well, you may try this '.*[0-9]'
