How to list specific type of files in recursive directories in shell?

How can we find specific type of files i.e. doc pdf files present in nested directories.

command I tried:

$ ls -R | grep .doc


but if there is a file name like alok.doc.txt the command will display that too which is obviously not what I want. What command should I use instead?

alok.doc.txt

6 Answers
6

If you are more confortable with "ls" and "grep", you can do what you want using a regular expression in the grep command (the ending '$' character indicates that .doc must be at the end of the line. That will exclude "file.doc.txt"):

ls -R |grep ".doc$"


More information about using grep with regular expressions in the man.

hellodoc

ls -R | grep ".doc$"

ls

ls

ls command output is mainly intended for reading by humans. For advanced querying for automated processing, you should use more powerful find command:

ls

find

find /path -type f ( -iname "*.doc" -o -iname "*.pdf" )


As if you have bash 4.0++

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s globstar
shopt -s nullglob
for file in **/*.pdf,doc
do
echo "$file"
done


ls **/*.pdf,doc

for file in **/*.pdf,doc

Some of the other methods that can be used:

echo *.pdf,docx,jpeg

echo *.pdf,docx,jpeg

stat -c %n * | grep 'pdf|docx|jpeg'

stat -c %n * | grep 'pdf|docx|jpeg'

We had a similar question. We wanted a list - with paths - of all the config files in the etc directory. This worked:

find /etc -type f ( -iname "*.conf" )


It gives a nice list of all the .conf file with their path. Output looks like:

/etc/conf/server.conf


But, we wanted to DO something with ALL those files, like grep those files to find a word, or setting, in all the files. So we use

find /etc -type f ( -iname "*.conf" ) -print0 | xargs -0 grep -Hi "ServerName"


to find via grep ALL the config files in /etc that contain a setting like "ServerName" Output looks like:

/etc/conf/server.conf: ServerName "default-118_11_170_172"


Hope you find it useful.

Sid

find . | grep ".doc$"


This will show the path as well.

Similarly if you prefer using the wildcard character * (not quite like the regex suggestions) you can just use ls with both the -l flag to list one file per line (like grep) and the -R flag like you had. Then you can specify the files you want to search for with *.doc
I.E. Either

*

ls

-l

-R

*.doc

ls -l -R *.doc


or if you want it to list the files on fewer lines.

ls -R *.doc


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