how to search directories starting with a certain letter?

Question

How can I search through directories starting with a certain letter with the Linux find command. For example I want to search all directories starting with the letter "a" for a file or directory "b".

Answer 1

Try a find in a find:

find . -type d -name "a*" -exec find {} -name "b" \;

Starting at the current directory (.), find will look for all directories starting with the letter a recursively. For each directory it finds, it will look inside it for a file named b.

If you only want it to look in the folders starting with a, and no directories in those a* folders, use maxdepth:

find . -type d -name "a*" -exec find {} -maxdepth 1 -name "b" \;

to get rid of errors:

find . -type d -name "a*" 2> /dev/null -exec find {} -maxdepth 1 -name "b" \;

Answer 2

Just a quick update for people who might end up on this question.

In addition to the solution John T provided, I have also found that you can exclude directories by using the prune switch (should have read the man pages sooner I guess, hehe.)

So for example if I want to search all directories for file or directory "b" except directories starting with an "a" I can do this

find . -path 'a*' -prune -o -name "b" -print

bing

Answer 3

you can also use find -regex...

find -regex .*/a.*/b