Recursively find files ending with specified pattern

Question

I have a lot of folders with files ending with "-105x135.jpg", "-410x410.jpg" etc., "780-105x135.jpg" and "candyswing-2-klein-ohrringe-schale-038-135x160.jpg" for example which i need to find and delete, using online regex I've created this pattern: [0-9]x..[0-9].jpg, but find . -regex '[0-9]x..[0-9].jpg' didn`t show any results.

Answer 1

According to the man page, the -regex option is a match on the entire path, ie. the entire file name and also the entire directory-path portion, so you would need to precede your regex with .*. There are several explicit examples in the man page.

Also, keep in mind the option -regextype. The default (per the man page) is emacs, but other options are posix-awk, posix-basic, posix-egrep and posix-extended. Knock yourself out.

Answer 2

Another option would be to use bash's globstar option:

shopt -s globstar

to list:

ls **/*[0-9][0-9][0-9]x[0-9][0-9][0-9].jpg

or remove:

rm **/*[0-9][0-9][0-9]x[0-9][0-9][0-9].jpg

the files.

The glob pattern above is slightly different that the regex you provided; the regex would allow any two characters after the x, not strictly numbers. In other words, a file named: somefile-135xyz9.jpg would match the regex, but not the above glob.

The glob recursively (**) matches files that:

• start with anything (*)
• have three numbers (three [0-9])
• followed by an x
• followed by three numbers
• followed by .jpg

One risk to this approach is if/when the number of matching files exceeds the command-line argument space. In that case, you could save the filenames in an array, then loop through the array individually.

To investigate:

files=(**/*[0-9][0-9][0-9]x[0-9][0-9][0-9].jpg)
for file in "${files[@]}"; do echo Would: rm -- "$file"; done

To remove:

files=(**/*[0-9][0-9][0-9]x[0-9][0-9][0-9].jpg)
for file in "${files[@]}"; do rm -- "$file"; done