I have a simple script that I understand most of, it's the find command that's unclear. I've got a lot of documentation but it's not serving to make it much clearer. My thought is that it is working like a for-loop, the currently found file is swapped in for {} and copied to $HOME/$dir_name, but how does the search with -path and -prune -o work? It's annoying to have such specific and relevant documentation and still not know what's going on.
#!/bin/bash
# The files will be search on from the user's home
# directory and can only be backed up to a directory
# within $HOME
read -p "Which file types do you want to backup " file_suffix
read -p "Which directory do you want to backup to " dir_name
# The next lines creates the directory if it does not exist
test -d $HOME/$dir_name || mkdir -m 700 $HOME/$dir_name
# The find command will copy files that match the
# search criteria ie .sh . The -path, -prune and -o
# options are to exclude the backdirectory from the
# backup.
find $HOME -path $HOME/$dir_name -prune -o \
-name "*$file_suffix" -exec cp {} $HOME/$dir_name/ \;
exit 0
This is just the documentation that I know I should be able to figure this out from.
-path pattern
File name matches shell pattern pattern. The metacharacters do not treat / or . specially; so, for example, find . -path "./sr*sc" will print an entry for a directory called ./src/misc (if one exists). To ignore a whole directory tree, use -prune rather than checking every file in the tree. For example, to skip the directory src/emacs and all files and directories under it, and print the names of the other files found, do something like this:
find . -path ./src/emacs -prune -o -print
From Findutils manual
-- Action: -exec command ; This insecure variant of the -execdir action is specified by POSIX. The main difference is that the command is executed in the directory from which find was invoked, meaning that {} is expanded to a relative path starting with the name of one of the starting directories, rather than just the basename of the matched file.
While some implementations of find replace the {} only where it appears on its own in an argument, GNU find replaces {} wherever it appears.
And
For example, to compare each C header file in or below the current directory with the file /tmp/master:
find . -name '*.h' -execdir diff -u '{}' /tmp/master ';'
find ... -prune
: stackoverflow.com/questions/1489277/…