Shell – How to find a file with a name which depends on the current date (and a random component)

datefindshell

I have to check a particular path every day and find the file with a name of the form:

StaticData_Sets_yyyymmdd-232550.txt

The date in the name after the string StaticData_Sets_ is updated every day depending on the system date. The number after the date is random.

How can I find the file for the current date in Unix?

Use command date to generate current day with proper output format, and append that string to file name in the following fashion:

filename=StaticData_Sets_$(date +"%Y%m%d")
find . -name "$filename*.txt"

mv "filename.ext" "/home/bin/filename-$(date +%Y%m%d).ext"

For question 1, you can do this:

find . -name "*.txt" | xargs grep -i "abc" | wc -l

This counts the total number of matches for abc in all text files.

And for question 2, I came up with:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec grep -i "abc" {} + | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq | wc -l

This gets just the unique filenames from the list of matches and counts them (the sort is probably not needed).

As pointed out by miracle173, grep comes with a "one match per file" flag so the command can be shortened to just:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec grep -il "abc" {} + | wc -l