Using find command in bash script

I just start to use bash script and i need to use find command with more than one file type.

list=$(find /home/user/Desktop -name '*.pdf') 

this code work for pdf type but i want to search more than one file type like .txt or .bmp together.Have you any idea ?

3 Answers

Welcome to bash. It's an old, dark and mysterious thing, capable of great magic. :-)

The option you're asking about is for the find command though, not for bash. From your command line, you can man find to see the options.

The one you're looking for is -o for "or":

 list="$(find /home/user/Desktop -name '*.bmp' -o -name '*.txt')"

That said ... Don't do this. Storage like this may work for simple filenames, but as soon as you have to deal with special characters, like spaces and newlines, all bets are off. See ParsingLs for details.

$ touch 'one.txt' 'two three.txt' 'foo.bmp'
$ list="$(find . -name \*.txt -o -name \*.bmp -type f)"
$ for file in $list; do if [ ! -f "$file" ]; then echo "MISSING: $file"; fi; done
MISSING: ./two
MISSING: three.txt

Pathname expansion (globbing) provides a much better/safer way to keep track of files. Then you can also use bash arrays:

$ a=( *.txt *.bmp )
$ declare -p a
declare -a a=([0]="one.txt" [1]="two three.txt" [2]="foo.bmp")
$ for file in "${a[@]}"; do ls -l "$file"; done
-rw-r--r-- 1 ghoti staff 0 24 May 16:27 one.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 ghoti staff 0 24 May 16:27 two three.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 ghoti staff 0 24 May 16:27 foo.bmp

The Bash FAQ has lots of other excellent tips about programming in bash.

If you want to loop over what you "find", you should use this:

find . -type f -name '*.*' -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do printf '%s\n' "$file"
done

Source:

You can use this:

list=$(find /home/user/Desktop -name '*.pdf' -o -name '*.txt' -o -name '*.bmp')

Besides, you might want to use -iname instead of -name to catch files with ".PDF" (upper-case) extension as well.