Shell – Piping Commands After a Piped xargs

findpipeshellxargs

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find . -type d -name *log* | xargs ls -la

gives me the directory names (the ones which contain log in the directory name) followed by all files within that directory.

The directories /var/opt/SID/application_a/log/, /var/opt/SID/application_b/log/, /var/opt/SID/application_c/log/ and so on contain log files.

I want only the two latest logfiles to be listed by the ls command, which I usually find using ls -latr | tail -2.

The output has to be something like this..

/var/opt/SID/application_a/log/
-rw-rw-rw-   1 user1    user1      59698 Jun 11  2013 log1
-rw-rw-rw-   1 user1    user1      59698 Jun 10  2013 log2
/var/opt/SID/application_b/log/
-rw-rw-rw-   1 user1    user1      59698 Jun 11  2013 log1
-rw-rw-rw-   1 user1    user1      59698 Jun 10  2013 log2
/var/opt/SID/application_c/log/
-rw-rw-rw-   1 user1    user1      59698 Jun 11  2013 log1
-rw-rw-rw-   1 user1    user1      59698 Jun 10  2013 log2

find . -type d -name *log* | xargs ls -la | tail -2 does not give me the above result. What I get is a list of last two files of
find . -type d -name *log* | xargs ls -la command.

So can I pipe commands after a piped xargs? How else do I query, to get the resultant list of files in the above format?

find . -type d -name *log* | xargs sh -c "ls -ltr | tail -10"

gives me a list of ten directory names inside the current directory which happens to be /var/opt/SID and that is also not what I want.

Best Answer

You are almost there. In your last command, you can use -I to do the ls correctly

-I replace-str
Replace occurrences of replace-str in the initial-arguments with names read from standard input. Also, unquoted blanks do not terminate input items; instead the separator is the newline character. Implies -x and -L 1.

So, with

find . -type d -name "*log*" | xargs -I {} sh -c "echo {}; ls -la {} | tail -2"

you will echo the dir found by find, then do the ls | tail on it.

Related Solutions

Shell – list all files newer than given timestamp and sort them

find supports a lot of date input formats. The simplest format to obtain is YYYYMMDD HH:MM:SS. You already have the digits in the right order, all you have to do is extract the first group (${timestamp%??????}: take all but the last 6 characters; ${timestamp#????????}: take all but the first 8 characters), and keep going, appending punctuation then the next group as you go along.

timestamp=20130207003851
timestring=${timestamp%??????}; timestamp=${timestamp#????????}
timestring="$timestring ${timestamp%????}"; timestamp=${timestamp#??}
timestring="$timestring:${timestamp%??}:${timestamp#??}"

In bash (and ksh and zsh), but not in ash, you can use the more readable ${STRING_VARIABLE:OFFSET:LENGTH} construct.

timestring="${timestamp:0:8} ${timestamp:8:2}:${timestamp:10:2}:${timestamp:12:2}"

To sort files by date, print out the file names preceded by the dates and sort that, then strip the date prefix. Use -printf to control the output format. %TX prints a part of the modification time determined by X; if X is @, you get the number of seconds since the Unix epoch. Below I print three tab-separated columns: the time in sortable format, the file name, and the time in human-readable format; cut -f 2- removes the first column and the call to expand replaces the tab by enough spaces to accommodate all expected file names (adjust 40 as desired). This code assumes you have no newlines or tabs in file names.

find -maxdepth 1 -type f \
     -newermt "$timestring" -printf '%T@\t%f\t%Tb %Td %TH:%TM\n' |
sort -k1n |
cut -f 2- |
expand -t 40

Find file names that don’t contain a specified string

Simply:

find . ! -name '*2013*'

Add a ! -type d to also exclude the files of type directory (like . itself), or -type f to include only regular files, excluding all other types of files (directories, fifos, symlinks, devices, sockets...).

Beware however that * matches a sequence of 0 or more characters. So it could report file names that contain 2013 if that 2013 was preceded or followed by something that cannot be fully decoded as valid characters in the current locale.

That can happen if you're in a locale where the characters can be encoded on more than one byte (like in UTF-8) for file names that are encoded in a different encoding. For instance, in a UTF-8 locale, it would report a Stéphane2013 file if that é had been encoded in the iso8859-15 character set (as the 0xe9 byte).

Best would be to make sure the file names are encoded in the locale's character set, but if you can't guarantee it, a work around is to run find in the C locale:

LC_ALL=C find . ! -name '*2013*'

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shell – list all files newer than given timestamp and sort them

Find file names that don’t contain a specified string

Related Question