How to use logical OR in find?

Question

In bash shell ls can use a logical OR functionality through (of course I could also do ls name1 name2 but my true examples are more complicated):

ls @(name1|name2)

Is there a way to do this using find?

My naive implementation:

find . -maxdepth 1 -name @("name1"|"name2")

doesn't work (it just outputs nothing)

Did you read the `OPERATORS` section of the `find` manpage? – steeldriver Jul 01 '15 at 12:44 — steeldriver, Jul 01 '15 at 12:44

score 26 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 01 '15 at 14:46

26

You can use -o for logical OR. Beware however that all find predicates have logical values, so you'll usually need to group ORed things together with parens. And since parens also have a meaning to the shell, you'll also need to escape them:

find /some/dir -maxdepth 1 \( -name '*.c' -o -name '*.h' \) -print

edited Jul 01 '15 at 14:46

Toby Speight

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answered Jul 01 '15 at 12:46

lcd047

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score 10 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 01 '15 at 16:19

10

To answer your question, you can use -o option:

   expr1 -o expr2
          Or; expr2 is not evaluated if expr1 is true.

   expr1 -or expr2
          Same as expr1 -o expr2, but not POSIX compliant.

like this:

$ find . -maxdepth 1 -name "name1" -o -name "name2"
./name1
./name2

edited Jul 01 '15 at 16:19

mhi

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answered Jul 01 '15 at 12:45

Arkadiusz Drabczyk

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How to use logical OR in find?

2 Answers2