check Mac folders for missing item

Question

Is there a way to check folders on your Mac for a missing item?

Say I want to scan my external hard drive, and find all of the folders with a certain word in the title, that are missing the file "Data.log"? What would be the easiest way to go about doing this, or is it even possible?

Answer 1

Using the great answer from @Nifle, but including your specifics try:

% find /Volumes/WD -type d -name *[TEST]* | while read a; do if [ ! -f $a/Data.log ]; then echo $a; fi; done  

Breaking this one-liner down:

• find /Volumes/WD -type d -name *[TEST]*: Walks the file tree from /Volumes/WD into your external HD looking for directories (-type d) which have [TEST] somewhere in their name (-name *[TEST]*).

• The output from the find command is piped (by |) into the bash while loop which pulls matching directories out one at a time storing them in a variable a.

• Within the loop:

  • The if statement checks that the file Data.log isn't in the directory being considered. In the if statement, $a is expanded so that $a/Data.log is a path like /Volumes/WD/<dir1>/<dir2>/Data.log. To get the test you're interested in ! and -f are used so that only cases where a file with that name doesn't exist will evaluate to TRUE (! is NOT, and -f indicates a file rather than any other type of filesystem entry like directories or links).
  • Finally, if we find a matching directory, it is printed by echo $a where $a is replaced as above by the directory name piped in from find.

I know I'm rehashing a previous answer, but I hope this clears up what is going on in the great one-liner put forward by @Nifle and gets your problem solved.

Answer 2

This should do the trick , run it in a shell.

find /Volumes/WD/ -type d -name '*TEST*' | while read a; do if [ ! -f $a/Data.log ]; then echo $a; fi; done;