Find Command – Find Files Containing Multiple Words in Any Order

find

I have a huge folder with a lot of subfolders where I would like to search for a folder that contains three words. Note that the folder name needs to have all three words, but the order of the words does not matter.

Example: I want to find folders containing the words APE, Banana and Tree.

find folder -name '*APE*Banana*Tree*'

However, this command will consider the order of the words, while this is not of interest and I want to find any folder with those words in any order.

Best Answer

Just use 3 -names:

find folder -name '*APE*' -name '*Banana*' -name '*Tree*'

Beware that like any time you use wildcards in the -name pattern that it may miss files whose name contains sequence of characters not forming valid characters in the user's locale.

With zsh:

set -o extendedglob # best in ~/.zshrc
print -rC1 -- **/(*Banana*~^*APE*~^*Tree*)(ND)

With ksh93:

FIGNORE='@(.|..)'
set -o globstar
set -- ~(N)**/@(*Banana*&*APE*&*Tree*)
(($# == 0)) || printf '%s\n' "$@"

With bash:

shopt -s globstar dotglob nullglob extglob
set -- **/!(!(*Banana*)|!(*APE*)|!(*Tree*))
(($# == 0)) || printf '%s\n' "$@"

Where:

D, FIGNORE, dotglob makes sure hidden files are also reported (like find does)
N, ~(N), nullglob makes the glob expand to nothing instead of causing an error or expand to itself when there's no match
globstar makes ksh93/bash understand zsh's **/ recursive globbing operator.
(x~^Y), @(X&Y), !(!(X)|!(Y)) being three approaches in the respective shells to match files that match both patterns.

Related Solutions

Shell – How to find text in files and only keep the respective matching lines using the terminal on OS X

grep would only find lines matching a pattern in a file, it wouldn't change the file. You could use sed to find the pattern and make changes to the file:

sed '/\B\/foobar\b/!d' filename

would display lines matching /foobar in the file. In order to save changes to the file in-place, use the -i option.

sed -i '/\B\/foobar\b/!d' filename

You could use it with find too:

find . -type f -exec sed -i'' '/\B\/foobar\b/!d' {} \;

Find the files between two folder dates in linux

Try this:

touch -d"April 13 3 AM" file1
touch -d"April 13 9 AM" file2
find . -newer file1 ! -newer file2 -exec grep -l "pcV6URY" {} +
rm file1 file2

How it works

find can work directly with times but touch handles human-style dates better:

touch -d"April 13 3 AM" file1; touch -d"April 13 9 AM" file2

This creates two files to mark the beginning and end of the time range.
find . -newer file1 ! -newer file2 -exec grep -l "pcV6URY" {} +

This finds files newer than file1 but not newer than file2. For all such files, it runs grep on them to see if they contain your string.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shell – How to find text in files and only keep the respective matching lines using the terminal on OS X

Find the files between two folder dates in linux

How it works

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