使用带有 grep 的查找不隔离文件

Question

I have a sequence of files that look like this:

image-seq 2020-04-13-05-50-00.jpg 
image-seq 2020-04-13-06-00-00.jpg
...
image-seq 2020-04-13-16-50-00.jpg
image-seq 2020-04-13-17-00-00.jpg

I'm trying to separate files with times from 17:00 until 05:50 the following day (so only the first and last filenames in the example should be returned). I thought I could use find with grep to isolate the files and then mv them, but files which shouldn't appear show up in the resulting output.

I'm using macOS grep, so I'm not sure if that's the issue.

The command I tried was:

find . -type f -name \*.jpg -exec grep -E '\-1[7-9]|2[0-3]|0[0-5]-\d{2}-\d{2}\.jpg' {} \;

I'm not sure what I've done incorrectly, but if you have any tips that'd be great.

Answer 1

On macOS find you may use this command to get your matching files using -E and -iregex options:

find -E . -iregex '.*(-1[7-9]|2[0-3]|0[0-5])(-[0-9]{2}){2}\.jpg'

./image-seq 2020-04-13-05-50-00.jpg
./image-seq 2020-04-13-17-00-00.jpg

Answer 2

Instead of searching inside the files using -exec grep search inside the list of filenames printed by find using a pipe find | grepfind | grep .

Then, you also have to adapt the regex. With -a|b|c- you search for either -a , b , or c- . You probably meant -(a|b|c)- which searches for either -a- , -b- , or -c- .

find . -type f -name \*.jpg | grep -E -e'-(1[7-9]|2[0-3]|0[0-5])-..-..\.jpg'

However, writing regexes for fitlering number ranges is tiring and error prone. As you probably know, above regex doesn't check the minutes. You might want to switch to awk instead:

find . -type f -name \*.jpg | awk -F- '$5>=17 || $5<5 || $5==5 && $6<=50'