LS command line bash help please!

[greener]

need to list all files and in all sub-directories that have a particular extension like *.mpg

from a newbie looking at the man pages it would go something like
ls *.mpg -R but no joy there...

thanks!!

[Freston]

Welcome to the forums!

`ls` does a lot, but in these cases you probably want to use `find`.

Something like:

find /path/to/files -name \*.mpg -print

[greener]

Thanks Freston,
any way to expand on your example to exclude certain directories? I guess I have a ton in my $RECYCLE.BIN which is making it difficult to find what I want...

rg

[lugoteehalt]

Experimented with my own thing - nothing distasteful - and it responded well to

find ~/* -name '*\.mp3' -print

'find' is an unfriendly bugger. And they seem to have changed it, at least its 'info'. The best thing about it in the past was its extensive 'info'.

[Freston]

any way to expand on your example to exclude certain directories?

Easiest way is to pipe through `grep -v`, something like this:

find /path/to/files -name \*.mpg -print | grep -v "trash"

[lugoteehalt]

Thanks Freston,
any way to expand on your example to exclude certain directories? I guess I have a ton in my $RECYCLE.BIN which is making it difficult to find what I want...

rg

find ~/* -name '*\.mp3' -print|grep -v NameOfDirectoryToExclude

Would be the standard way to do that. The output of the find command is piped to the input of the grep command and grep zaps, the -v option, anything with NameOfDirectoryToExclude in the string.

[blnl]

Find is indeed not easy to use, but it is a very powerful tool.

If you want to learn about find read this tutorial:
Beginners Linux Guide; Using the find command

[theNbomr]

You are almost there, but "-R" option to be used before the names ls -R will go recursively. To get specific file names, pipeline it for a filter: ls -R | grep "mpg"

The "find" command will work as well, however, "find" is very resource consuming, because it reads file descriptors, "ls" (if used without "-l") reads only directory entries and so very fast and efficient.

Yabut...
ls -R *.mpg will only work if there actually is a matching file in the specified directory. Also, the output of find is much friendlier as a list to be piped to some other tool. It just gives the full filespec of each matching file, and no cruft to filter out.

--- rod.

[blnl]

Obviously there are many different ways to do the same thing.

As OP requested files in ALL directories a small correction is required.

ls -Ra | grep mpg