using brace expansion with find

[funky1]

Hello all,

I am interested in a more flexible targeted search in my directories. For example, if I am searching for all .txt .dat and .bat files (then perform an operation), I would think that the following would work:
find . -name '*.{txt,dat,bat}' -exec ...

But I get no results. I am running on Cygwin.

I have confirmed that:
find . -name '*.txt' -exec ...
find . -name '*.dat' -exec ...
find . -name '*.bat' -exec ...

all find the aforementioned files. But,
find . -name '*.{txt}'
still produces no output.

Thanks for any assistance

[atreyu]

how bout:

find . -name '*.txt' -o -name '*.dat' -o -name '*.bat' -exec ...

[funky1]

ateryu,

Thanks for the suggestion. This will work.

Though, I am still curious as to how to incorporate the brace expansion into the find statement. This will significantly simplify things as lists of file types get larger.

Adam

[atreyu]

okay, how bout this? it which just 'ls' every file that it finds:

find . -name '*.txt' -o -name '*.dat' -o -name '*.bat' -exec ls -l {} \;

the curly braces are just a variable substitution for each file found, and the backslash semicolon is required to tell find you are done with the variable.

[funky1]

This is basically what I have been doing:
find . -name '*.txt' -exec grep -l 'Find this' {} \;

I would like to know if there is a more elegant way to use brace expansion instead of typing out each :
-o -name '*.txt'

BTW how do you get your example in 'code' format? I am new to this message board.

Thanks.

[atreyu]

sorry, but i'm not sure what you mean by more elegant. you could just do this in straight grep though, e.g.:

grep -l 'Find this' *.txt

you can make your text appear as code by highlighting your text, then clicking the '#' character in the above formatting bar.

[funky1]

When I am refering to more elegant, I would like to not have to use multiple -o -name in my find command. To be able to use the brace expansion:

*.{dat,txt,bat,cv,irh}

to search for all such files in the subfolders. It is not the grep part that I am concerned with right now. Just getting the aforementioned expansion to work with 'find'.

BTW, thanks for the help with the code highlight. I needed to open the 'advanced features' button to access that capability.

Thanks,

[atreyu]

I don't know of another way to pass multiple searches to find, sorry.