How to list specific type of files in recursive directories in shell?

Question

How can we find specific type of files ie doc pdf files present in nested directories.

command I tried:

$ ls -R | grep .doc

but if there is a file name like alok.doc.txt the command will display that too which is obviously not what I want. What command should I use instead?

Answer 1

If you are more confortable with "ls" and "grep", you can do what you want using a regular expression in the grep command (the ending '$' character indicates that .doc must be at the end of the line. That will exclude "file.doc.txt"):

ls -R |grep "\.doc$"

More information about using grep with regular expressions in the man .

Answer 2

ls command output is mainly intended for reading by humans. For advanced querying for automated processing, you should use more powerful find command:

find /path -type f \( -iname "*.doc" -o -iname "*.pdf" \) 

As if you have bash 4.0++

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s globstar
shopt -s nullglob
for file in **/*.{pdf,doc}
do
  echo "$file"
done

Answer 3

find . | grep "\.doc$"

这也将显示路径。

Answer 4

可以使用的其他一些方法：

echo *.{pdf,docx,jpeg}

stat -c %n * | grep 'pdf\\|docx\\|jpeg'

Answer 5

We had a similar question. We wanted a list - with paths - of all the config files in the etc directory. This worked:

find /etc -type f \( -iname "*.conf" \)

It gives a nice list of all the .conf file with their path. Output looks like:

/etc/conf/server.conf

But, we wanted to DO something with ALL those files, like grep those files to find a word, or setting, in all the files. So we use

find /etc -type f \( -iname "*.conf" \) -print0 | xargs -0 grep -Hi "ServerName"

to find via grep ALL the config files in /etc that contain a setting like "ServerName" Output looks like:

/etc/conf/server.conf: ServerName "default-118_11_170_172"

Hope you find it useful.

Sid

Answer 6

Similarly if you prefer using the wildcard character * (not quite like the regex suggestions) you can just use ls with both the -l flag to list one file per line (like grep) and the -R flag like you had. Then you can specify the files you want to search for with *.doc IE Either

ls -l -R *.doc

or if you want it to list the files on fewer lines.

ls -R *.doc

Answer 7

If you have files with extensions that don't match the file type, you could use the file utility.

find $PWD -type f -exec file -N \\{\\} \\; | grep "PDF document" | awk -F: '{print $1}'

Instead of $PWD you can use the directory you want to start the search in. file prints even out he PDF version.