find all cpp files and list only those files with names that match a pattern (regex) does not work

Question

I have a whole repository of files and I am trying to get a list of files that match a certain criteria.

For example, let us say that I want to take all the files that have the string foo1 and foo2/foo3 in the path and do not have bar1 or bar2/bar3. Note that it is possible for bar1 or bar2/bar3 to be a sub directory of foo* and in that case those directories should also be excluded. I tried the following method:

IN_REGEX="$1"
OUT_REGEX="$2"

find . -name '*'.cpp | grep $IN_REGEX | grep -v $OUT_REGEX

I call this script in this way:

 ./script "/foo1/\|/foo2\/foo3/" "/bar1/\|/bar2\/bar3/"

However, the loop never gets executed. I tried changing the " in the command line arguments to '. But that did not help. I tried changing the greps to sed commands like so:

find . -name '*'.cpp | sed "\m%$IN_REGEX%" | sed "\%$OUT_REGEX%d"

Again, no success. However, when I try to execute the grep on the bash shell directly. It works fine. I have spent the whole day today trying to figure this out.

Can someone please help me out?

Answer 1

You can use the !(negate) and -path command-switches of find to accomplish this

$ find . \( ! -path "*bar*" -a ! -path "*bar2\/bar3*" -a -path "*foo*" -print \)

This will search in folders excluding bar, bar2/bar3, and including folders with foo in path. Give this a try. The syntax might change with different versions of find command.

Refer find man page for more details.

Answer 2

It seams to work fine if you remove the " line 1 and 2 when you are receiving the arguments :

IN_REGEX=$1
OUT_REGEX=$2

find . -name '*'.cpp | grep $IN_REGEX | grep -v $OUT_REGEX