common linux commands

Question:

    ionh May 16, 2011 at 3:32 pm

    I’ve been trying to figure out how to “find” a set of files, with *both* inclusive and exclusive name filters, and then execute a command on the results – conceptually, something like:

    find . -iname “*.txt” -exec grep -v blob ; cp {} MyDir \;

    Of course, this is broken, but should indicate what i’m trying to do, namely,
    find all “*.txt” files; reject any that are “*blob*”; and copy the rest to the MyDir directory.

    Anyone know how to do this?

 

My answer:

    hi ionh, 

    step 1, find all .txt files in the current directory and all of its subdirectories

$ find . -type f -name “*.txt”

    step 2, pipe the result to grep, find those files containing ‘blob’ 

$ find . -type f -name “*.txt” | grep ‘blob’

    step 3, add ‘-v’ (invert-match), find those files not containing ‘blob’

$ find . -type f -name “*.txt” | grep -v ‘blob’

    step 4, pipe the file list to xargs, which breaks the list into sublists and deal with each one of them, note here we have to use ‘--target-directory’ to clarify our intention.

 $ find . -type f -name “*.txt” | grep -v ‘blob’| xargs cp --target-directory=newDir

    now you got all the files you want in the newDir.