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I have a project directory that contains source code and subdirectories of source code. I want to use the Unix program find to search recursively for the names of files of certain extensions. The versions of find on Linux and Mac OS X behave differently.

# Works in Linux
find . -type f -regex ".*\.\(py\|html\)$"

# Neither of these works in Mac OS X
find . -type f -regex ".*\.\(py\|html\)$"
find . -type f -regex ".*\.(py|html)$"

How do I write this command so that it will run on Mac OS X (and hopefully on Linux too)?

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It would be helpful if you told us in what way they behave differently. – Nifle Mar 10 '10 at 8:27
The command is supposed to find files. On OS X, the same command finds nothing (zero files). – hekevintran Mar 10 '10 at 8:29
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2 Answers

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Mac OS X uses BSD find and most Linux distributions come with GNU find. I believe you can install GNU findutils onto Mac OS X. I don't have a Mac handy, but I am sure it was available in MacPorts.

Looking at the BSD find man page I could make a wild guess and suggest you try looking at the -E option to enable the modern regular expression library.

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Getting findutils from MacPorts did the trick. – hekevintran Mar 10 '10 at 9:02
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up vote 1 down vote

The following work with BSD find on OS X.

find -E . -type f -regex ".*\.(py|html)$"

find . -type f | grep -e ".*\.\(py\|html\)$"
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