I'm working on a project where I need to search through a specific directory to find all types of image files. Currently, I have this command: `find . -type f ( -iname "*.jpg" -o -iname "*.png" -o -iname "*.mp4" ) -print`. However, I anticipate needing to add more file types in the future. I'm wondering if there's a cleaner way to manage this. For instance, could I define a list of file types and incorporate that into the find command? Something like this:
filetypes = [jpg, png, mp4, ... ]
find . -type f -print
4 Answers
Another straightforward method is to use the `file` command combined with `grep` to find images:
find . | xargs file | grep "image data" | cut -d: -f1
It pulls the image files based on the file type.
You can create a loop in bash to handle this more dynamically. Here's a neat example:
(e='jpg png mp4 jpeg gif bmp xwd tiff'; for e in $e; do if [ "$#" -eq 0 ]; then set -- ( -iname "*.$e"; else set "$@" -o -iname "*.$e"; fi; done; [ "$#" -eq 0 ] || set -- "$@" ); unset e; find . -type f "$@" -print)
This is a clever way to utilize bash positional parameters!
This is awesome! Such a brilliant way to use bash.
Most versions of the `find` command now support regex. You can shorten your command to:
find . -type f -regex '.*.(jpg|png|mp4)$'
It might look complex, but it reduces the amount of `-iname` arguments you need to use.
If you're not too concerned about real-time accuracy, you can use this alternative with `locate`:
locate --regexp "${PWD}.*.(jpg|png|mp4)$"
In my opinion, using the built-in `-o` operator is the simplest and most readable approach. You could also utilize `-regex` for matching, but as your list grows, managing escaped characters can get tricky. Alternatively, you could store your file patterns in a text file and use `xargs` to read from it like this:
xargs -a patterns.txt -I% find files/ -iname %
If you have a large number of files, consider using the `file` command on all files and then piping that into `grep` to filter for "image". It all depends on your situation though!
You might want to try using single quotes around 'image data' to ensure accuracy!