find all audio files in a folder using bash in linux

Question

When I am using wildcards with ls command, it works.

$ ls '*.{mp3,ogg}'  # Showing only two formats in the command
cannot access *.mp3: No such file or directory
1.ogg 2.ogg 3.ogg

but using find command doesn't work

$ find ~ -iname '*.{mp3,ogg}'

What is the error in the line?

Answer 1

I think this should work for you

   find ~ -name "*.mp3" -o -name "*.ogg"

-o is equivalent to boolean or

Answer 2

If you enable extglob (shopt -s extglob), you can use *.@(ogg|mp3).

shopt -s extglob
printf '%s\n' *.@(mp3|ogg)

If you need recursion too, enable globstar (requires bash 4.0 or newer)

shopt -s extglob globstar
printf '%s\n' **/*.@(mp3|ogg)

When you use ls *.{mp3,ogg}, you are combining brace expansion and pathname expansion. What happens is:

ls *.{mp3,ogg}  
ls *.mp3 *.ogg  # after brace expansion
ls '*.mp3' 1.ogg 2.ogg 3.ogg # after pathname expansion

If there's no matching files for a glob, the glob will just be passed on unchanged. And ls will treat it as a literal filename; it doesn't know about globs/wildcards.

The find ~ -iname '*.{mp3,ogg}' doesn't work because find doesn't do brace expansion, that's a bash feature.

Answer 3

This one provides you with even those files which do not have mp3 or audio extension.

find -print0 | xargs -0 file -F '//' | awk -F '//' 'tolower($2) ~ /audio/ { print $1 }'

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which interprets to:

find . -print0 Find (list) every file and output with a null terminator

xargs -0 file -F '//' Run file(1) with the stdin (or piped input), delimited by null character, as the first argument.

file -F '//' Delimit file name and its type by // as it neither appears in a UNIX filename nor as a file type.

awk -F '//' '...' Use the // delimiter as field separator. The awk script case-insensitively matches the occurrence of audio in the second field (ie the file type as reported by file(1)) and for every match, prints the file path.