bash script does not compare file names with [ and ] correctly

Question

I have a bash script that deals with files. It finds all the files in one directory and searches for the name of each in another directory. For that it uses

"${myfiletobesearched}"

inside the script. However if the file name contains [ or ], the script won't find it in the second directory, even if a copy of the file is there as well. What can I do, so that the file names are recognized to be the same?

I was able to narrow the problem down to an example.

myfile="My File [Official Awesome File].txt"
find ./ -name "${myfile}" -type f

does give any output, even if there is a file with that name. To write \[ or something like that is of course not an option, because myfile comes from inspecting a directory.

Here is the script: https://gist.github.com/Make42/5bdae5e4de32cff0d01c9486b09383ee

Answer 1

myfile="My File [Official Awesome File].txt"
myfile=$(echo $myfile | sed -r 's/(\[|\])/\\\1/g')    
find ./ -name "${myfile}" -type f

can you check if this works?

I'm expecting this'll change value of myfile to

myfile="My File \[Official Awesome File\].txt"

---

Better would be to use printf:

myfile=$(printf '%q\n' "$myfile")

In your specific example within find that would be:

find ./ -name "$(printf '%q\0' "$myfile")" -type f

Answer 2

The argument to find's -name parameter is a glob pattern, not a file name, and square brackets are glob pattern metacharacters.

I found one way around this is to use an in-line perl script which uses an exact-string match instead of a pattern:

myfile="My File [Official Awesome File].txt"
perl -MFile::Find -le 'find( sub {
  return unless $_ eq $ARGV[0];
  print $File::Find::name;
}, $ARGV[1] )' "${myFile}" .