I've had occasion to need to grab a specific set of files from a large
directory -- most recently, I needed to grab some specific access logs from
our Apache logfiles at work.
Enter find.
I needed to get all files newer than a specific date, and with the pattern
'sitename-access_log.timestamp.gz'. I then needed to tar up these files and
grab them for processing. So, here's what I did:
- The -newer filename tells find to locate files newer than
filename.
- The -regex flag tells find to locate files matching the
regular expression. The regex that find uses is a little strange,
however, and didn't follow many conventions I know; for one thing, it's
assumed that the pattern you write will match against the entire string,
and not just a portion of it. What I ended up using was
-regex '.*access_log.*gz', and that worked.
- The -printf flag tells find to format the printing. This is
useful when using the output of find in another program. For instance,
tar likes a list of filenames... so I used printf "%p ",
which separated each filename with a space.
I then backticked my full find statement and used it as the final argument
to a tar command; voila! instant tar file with the files I need!
