Looping through a pattern for use in a bash find command

Question

I'm trying to write a simple bash script to look through a directory and delete all versions of a file (except the latest 2) that match a pattern. This command works great:

find . -type f -name 'a.*.log' -printf '%T@\t%p\n' \
  | sort -t $'\t' -g \
  | head -n -2 \
  | cut -d $'\t' -f 2- \
  | xargs rm -f

This will take the following files: a.1.log, a.2.log, and a.3.log, and delete a.1.log (assuming it's the oldest by timestamp). The version portion of the filename is a hash, so not numerically in order (I changed it for simplicity).

So, what I want to do is loop through a set of different patterns and feed each one to the find command above. I've simplified the script for this example to look like this:

#!/bin/bash
FILES="a.*.log
b.*.log
c.*.log"

for f in $FILES
do
    echo "Processing $f"
    find . -type f -name "$f"
done

The directory I'm running this from has these files:

a.1.log, a.2.log, a.3.log, b.1.log, b.2.log, b.3.log, c.1.log, c.2.log, c.3.log

The output I get from the above script is:

Processing a.1.log
./a.1.log
Processing a.2.log
./a.2.log
Processing a.3.log
./a.3.log
Processing b.1.log
./b.1.log
Processing b.2.log
./b.2.log
Processing b.3.log
./b.3.log
Processing c.1.log
./c.1.log
Processing c.2.log
./c.2.log
Processing c.3.log
./c.3.log

What I need is for the output to look like this:

Processing a.*.log
./a.1.log
./a.2.log
./a.3.log
Processing b.*.log
./b.1.log
./b.2.log
./b.3.log
Processing c.*.log
./c.1.log
./c.2.log
./c.3.log

I've tried using an array instead of looping through a string, escaping the file patterns, using single vs double quotes in the find, etc... But I can't get it to simply substitute the pattern into the find. If I run the finds individually by hand, it gives me the output I'm looking for:

$ find . -type f -name "a.*.log"
./a.1.log
./a.2.log
./a.3.log
$ find . -type f -name "b.*.log"
./b.1.log
./b.2.log
./b.3.log
$ find . -type f -name "c.*.log"
./c.1.log
./c.2.log
./c.3.log

I can't find any examples of someone looping through a collection of patterns and substituting them into a command. Any help would be awesome.

Thanks.

Answer 1

the problem you encounter is that without quotes variable is split but also file globbing occurs, this can be avoided using shell option noglob set -f , or using an array and using double quotes :

files=( 'a.*.log' 'b.*.log' 'c.*.log' )

for f in "${files[@]}"; do
...