'find' files containing an integer in a specified range (in bash)

Question

You'd think I could find an answer to this already somewhere, but I am struggling to do so. I want to find some log files with names like

myfile_3.log

however I only want to find the ones with numbers in a certain range. I tried things like this:

find <path> -name myfile_{0..67}.log #error: find: paths must precede expression
find <path> -name myfile_[0-67].log #only return 0-7, not 67
find <path> -name myfile_[0,67].log #only returns 0,6,7
find <path> -name myfile_*([0,67]).log # returns only 0,6,7,60,66,67,70,76,77

Any other ideas?

Answer 1

If you want to match an integer range using regular expression, use the option -regex in the your find command.

For example to match all files from 0 to 67, use this:

find <path> -regextype egrep -regex '.*file([0-5][0-9]|6[0-7])\.txt'

There are 2 parts in the regex:

• [0-5][0-9] matches the range 0-59
• 6[0-7] matches the range 60-67

Note the option -regextype egrep to have extended regular expression.
Note also the option -regex matches the whole filename, including path, that's the reason of .* at the beginning of the regex.

Answer 2

You can do this simply and concisely, but admittedly not very efficiently, with GNU Parallel:

parallel find . -name "*file{}.txt" ::: {0..67}

In case, you are wondering why I say it is not that efficient, it is because it starts 68 parallel instances of find - each looking for a different number in the filename... but that may be ok.