helpneeded

I hope you can put me in the correct path as I am having a bit of
difficulty writing a script to search for directories that begin with
2 characters and 3 numbers and does not mater about the rest of the
name of the directory for example:

GS001_Anything_test
TS636_Test

Ideally I would like to pattern match [any 2 characters] and
[3 numbers]and the rest as a *

I hope my problem that makes sense

Please Help

GNU-Fan

Hi,

you will have to learn regular expressions for this.
With these, you can write critera like
[:alpha:] for characters, [:digit:] for numbers.
Regular expression - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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helpneeded

do you mean like the following

find /usr -name [abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz]+[1234567890]+*

how do you fix the find and make it search from the left and only upto 6 characters and numbers until it reaches _*

then display results

GNU-Fan

No, I mean like
find /usr -regex PATTERN
where PATTERN is a code sequence you have to develop based on the link above.

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nopycckn

The regular expression I believe you're talking about would be:
to match. Printing it's dependent on what you use to match and print. I'm not so sure.

nopycckn

[abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz]+[1234567890]+*
is a regular expression matching:
at least one lowercase character followed by at least one digit (an asterisk would mean any number of times, but I believe the syntax to be wrong (just [0-9]+* alone is like saying at least one digit any number of times). It will complain and not work correctly using PERL, written this way - with a message of nested quantifiers in regex.)
It can be written simply as /[a-z]+\d+/, without the asterisk, but it's not the right regular expression for the job.

ghostdog74

find /path -type d -name "[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z][0-9][0-9][0-9]*"

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nopycckn

I used a regular expression like you would use in PERL, but I know there are variations with find, sed, etc. Not trying to sound like an expert, but I didn't realize that there was quite so much difference between PERL regular expressions and these, also ... I thought the {2} {3} would be pretty much universal. I kind of rushed into it, I took for granted there were even more similarities. Apologies, won't happen again.

helpneeded

thank you all and to "ghostdog74" much appreciated.

find /path -type d -name "[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z][0-9][0-9][0-9]*"

What do I need to do to display any directory found inside a parent directory based on find patern matching.

For example

[parent Directory1]
GS001_Anything_test
TS636_Test
[parent Directory2]
GS001_Anything_test
TS637_Test
[parent Directory3]
TT001_Anything_test
TB636_Test

Thanks for all your advice and help.

nopycckn

I am very sure that the last asterisk is only applying to the last [0-9]. It's saying any amount (even 0) of [0-9]. To say anything after the last [0-9] would be .*