find

I ran into a situation this morning where I needed to use the Linux find command to (a) find all the MP3 files beneath my current directory and (b) copy them to another directory. In this case I didn't want to do a cp -r command or tar command to preserve the directory structure; instead, I wanted all of the files to end up in the same directory (so I could easily import them into iTunes).

Here's a shell script that I use that search Java jar files for any type of pattern. You can use it to search for the name of a class, the name of a package, or any other string/pattern that will show up if you manually ran jar tvf on each jar file. The advantage of this script -- if you're a Unix, Linux, or Cygwin user -- is that this script will search through all jar files in the current directory.

Free Unix and Linux tutorials: Wow, this blog post makes me feel a little old. As I've been working on reorganizing the website lately, I found that I've written more than seventy-five Unix and Linux tutorials. To try to make them easier to find, I created this page to link most of them up.

So, to that end, here is a list of at least 75 free Unix and Linux tutorials I've written. I hope you enjoy them, and I hope they're helpful.

This morning I decided to take a few minutes to backup all the songs I've purchased over the last half-year. These are all on my Mac OS X system, under the Music folder in my home directory.

The problem with trying to do this with standard Unix tools is that all these subdirectories and filenames have spaces in their names. Just looking at the Music folder, it contains many directory names like this:

Unix/Linux find "patterns" FAQ: How do I find files or directories that don't match a specific pattern (files not matching a regex pattern, or filename pattern)?

In my case I just ran into a situation where I needed to find all files below the current subdirectory that are NOT named with the filename pattern "*.html" . Fortunately with the newer Unix/Linux find syntax this solution is pretty easy, you just include the "-not" argument, like this: