Allowing arbitrary files to be matched by find

Question

I am passing arguments to bash function, composed of directories and files. The following code validates the arguments before staring then in the array fdir.

declare -A tag
for arg in "$@"; do
  printf '%s\n' "arg: $arg"  
  [[ -d "$arg" || -f "$arg" ]] || continue
  [[ ${tag[$arg]} ]] && continue
  fdir+=("$arg")
  tag[$arg]=1
done

Finally, I pass the contents of fdir to the find command and finally run head on the matched files.

local _GREP="/bin/grep --color"
hn=13
sufx=( \( -name '*.sh' -o -name '*.c' \) )
mxdpt=( -maxdepth 3 )
find "${fdir[@]}" -type f "${sufx[@]}" "${mxdpt[@]}"  \
  -exec head -v -n "$hn" '{}' + 

Because I use sufx in the file command, if I pass a different type of file (e.g. /home/flora/file.org), the find will not find a match.

One solution would be to have directories to precede files in the array fdir. Loop through each element in fdir and set sufx=() as soon as I detect the first file.

   declare -A tag

   local daggr=()
   for arg in "$@"; do
     [[ ! -d "$arg" ]] || continue
     [[ ${tag[$arg]} ]] && continue
     daggr+=("$arg")
     tag[$arg]=1
   done

   local faggr=()
   for arg in "$@"; do
     [[ ! -f "$arg" ]] && continue
     [[ ${tag[$arg]} ]] && continue
     faggr+=("$arg")
     tag[$arg]=1
   done

   fdir=( "${daggr[@]}" "${faggr[@]}" )

 for (( i=0 ; i < $n ; i++ )); do
   [[ -f "${fdir[$i]}" ]] && { sufx=() ; mxdpt=() ; }
   find "${fdir[$i]}" -type f "${sufx[@]}" "${mxdpt[@]}"  \
     -exec head -v -n "$hn" '{}' +
 done

Any advice on better or simpler ways that I could try?

Answer 1

First, you have to quote this:

sufx=( \( -name '*.sh' -o -name '*.c' \) )

If find shall apply -exec to all files in "${fdir[@]}" but only to certain files within the passed directories then a simple approach would be to have two find calls:

find "${fdir[@]}" -maxdepth 0 -type f -exec head -v -n "$hn" '{}' +
find "${fdir[@]}" -mindepth 1 -type f "${sufx[@]}" "${mxdpt[@]}"  \
  -exec head -v -n "$hn" '{}' +