Find cmd can't find "*_2.jpg" files

[Johnno]

I have a duplicate bunch of of photos in various subdirectories where the duplicates have had an '_2' added to the file name ... thus all duplicates end in *_2.jpg.

But I cant get the find command to filter these (The aim of game being to -exec rm those buggers.) (I'm using Ubuntu intrepid with bash shell.)

cmd> find . -name "*_2.jpg" # doesn't return anything - zilch

cmd> find . -name "*2.jpg" # returns all those files ending *2.jpg such as '140_4082.jpg' apart from those where the 2 is prefixed with an underscore such as '140_4082_2.jpg'

cmd> find . -name "*_2*" # returns all files such as 'img_2210.jpg' which I don't want to rm but does include those prefixed _2.jpg such as '140_4085_2.jpg' which I do want.

So I can have '.jpg' Or I can have '_' in the expression but it seems I just can't have both at the same time?

Hmmmm - any guru's of find out there - John

[tetsujin]

Can't think of why this problem would be occurring, as described. It works on my machine...

I don't know how familiar you are with Unix, and I don't want to be insulting - but could this be a case-sensitivity issue? "*_2.jpg" won't match file_2.JPG (nor file_2.jpeg, but that's a different problem...) - you can get around this by using "find -iname" instead of "find -name"...

Among other things, it appears that none of the example patterns you indicated actually included a *_2.jpg file in the results? That might lend extra credence to my theory that this is a capitalization issue...

Alternately, maybe try 'find . -name "*_2.*' - note the dot after the 2... Or 'find . -name "*_2.???"' if you want to get only files that end in underscore-two-dot-(three-character extension)...

[Johnno]

Please - insult away - I deserve it. Yes - JPG not jpg. I thought it should work .. too tired to think straight.

Thanks tetssujin - John

[Rubberman]

You need to use single quotes around the file name with the wild-card, not double quotes. IE: find . -type f -name '*_2.jpg'
When you use double quotes, the shell tries to expand it, resulting in incorrect, or in your case, no results. The single quotes "guard" the wild card so it is passed as-is to the find command, which uses it internally with its regular-expression evaluator.

[tetsujin]

You need to use single quotes around the file name with the wild-card, not double quotes. IE: find . -type f -name '*_2.jpg'
When you use double quotes, the shell tries to expand it

No it doesn't.

> mkdir test; cd test; touch a b c; ls
a  b  c
> echo *
a b c
> echo "*"
*
>

Double-quotes expand variables and other substitution forms - they don't expand globs. (At least, this is the behavior of Bash on my machine with my configuration...)

[Rubberman]

No it doesn't.

> mkdir test; cd test; touch a b c; ls
a  b  c
> echo *
a b c
> echo "*"
*
>

Double-quotes expand variables and other substitution forms - they don't expand globs. (At least, this is the behavior of Bash on my machine with my configuration...)

I stand corrected.