linux find regex

regex linux bash unix find
Dijkstra picture Dijkstra · Apr 12, 2011 · Viewed 114.1k times · Source

I'm having trouble using the regex of the find command. Probably something I don't understand about escaping on the command line.

Why are these not the same?

find -regex '.*[1234567890]'
find -regex '.*[[:digit:]]'

Bash, Ubuntu

Answer

bmk picture bmk · Apr 12, 2011

You should have a look on the -regextype argument of find, see manpage:

      -regextype type
          Changes the regular expression syntax understood by -regex and -iregex 
          tests which occur later on the command line.  Currently-implemented  
          types  are  emacs (this is the default), posix-awk, posix-basic, 
          posix-egrep and posix-extended.

I guess the emacs type doesn't support the [[:digit:]] construct. I tried it with posix-extended and it worked as expected:

find -regextype posix-extended -regex '.*[1234567890]'
find -regextype posix-extended -regex '.*[[:digit:]]'

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