How to find files ending with ~ and pyc?

Question

I want to find all files (in current and all subdirectory) which end in'~' or 'pyc'. To do so I have tried the following find pattern:

find . -name '*{~,pyc}'
find . -name '{*~,*.pyc}'

but neither list any of the files present in the diectory. Why do these patterns not work? How to do it right?

When using ls instead of find (without the quotation mark) I get the expected result (except that ls only shows the current directory and not all the subdirectories).

It is a different question. I wanted to use a more compact expression to do a similar task. — Alex, Apr 06 '13 at 07:54

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 06 '13 at 06:01

6

find . -type f \( -name "*~" -o -name "*pyc" \)

This will return all files (-type f) that end with either ~ or (-o) pyc.

answered Apr 06 '13 at 06:01

jasonwryan

73,126

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 06 '13 at 07:54

4

It would be much easier with regular expression if you have the GNU find,

find . -regextype posix-egrep -regex '.*(~|pyc)$'

P.S I guess you're using shell expansion with find? If so, that's not possible, use find . -name '*.pyc' -o -name '*~' instead.

edited Apr 06 '13 at 07:54

Stéphane Chazelas

544,893

answered Apr 06 '13 at 05:59

daisy

54,555

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 06 '13 at 08:03

If it's compactness you're after, with zsh:

printf '%s\n' **/*(~|pyc)(.D)

(D for dotfiles as well, . for regular files only)

If you wanted to use shell brace expansion, you'd have to do things like:

eval 'find . -type f ! \(' '! -name \*'{~,pyc} '\)'

Which the shell expands to:

eval 'find . -type f ! \(' '! -name \*~' '! -name \*pyc' '\)'

Which is then asking the shell to evaluate this command line:

find . -type f ! \( ! -name \*~ ! -name \*pyc \)

How to find files ending with ~ and pyc?

3 Answers3