How to find a file with partially specified path?

Question

I am trying to find all my .txt and .csv files in my backup (Apple's time machine).

The structure of the backup directories is like this:

/machine name/date/Macintosh HD/

The above contains all the files from my machine on that day. I have many of those directories as the backup drive contains stuff from multiple machines, last 3 years.

What I am interested in is to find my text and CSV files so for example file:

/mac1/2014-08-31-173253/Macintosh HD/Users/me/Documents/work/file1.txt

So I need to find all .txt files which have somewhere on their path /Users/me

John WH Smith · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-22T16:21:51.997

4

You could use find, provided it's available:

$ find "/mac1/2014-08-31-173253/Macintosh HD" -wholename "*/Users/me/*.txt" -or -wholename "*/Users/me/*.csv"

This will search /mac1/2014-08-31-173253/Macintosh HD for files containing the pattern */Users/me/*.(txt|csv) in their paths.

edited Dec 22 '14 at 16:21

answered Dec 22 '14 at 16:16

John WH Smith

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`... $ -name '*.txt' -o -name '*.csv' $ -a -wholename '*/Users/me/*'` should be more efficient. – Hauke Laging Dec 22 '14 at 16:45

score -1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 22 '14 at 19:32

Probably you can just do:

set --
for d in /mac[123]/201[1-4]*'/Macintosh HD/Users/me/Documents/work/'
do  for g in .txt .csv
do  set -- "$d"*"$g"
    [ -e "$1" ] || shift
done

In that way you'd get an array of all of the file names in "$@" - but you'd need to glob the directory bit - which is what the /mac[123]/ is for, and I'm only guessing at the names of those directories.

How to find a file with partially specified path?

2 Answers2